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Library of The Theological Seminary 
PRINCETON * NEW JERSEY 
sso 
PRESENTED BY 


aa G 

the BHstate of the 
TD | tT .7 San an 
Rev. John B. Wiedinger 


BX 8333)).H6>T5 


Housh, Lynn Harold, 1877- 
The imperial voice 





ea F 
el i is i 


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THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


THE’ MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON + CHICAGO + DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Lutep 
LONDON + BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lr. 
TORONTO 


THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


AND OTHER SERMONS AND ADDRESSES 


BY 
LYNN HAROLD ‘HOUGH, TH.D., D.D. 


Mew Pork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1924 


All rights reservea 


Coprricut, 1924, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and printed. 
Published April, 1924. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK 


TO MY FRIEND 
HARRY F. KEEP, Esq. 


WITH MEMORIES OF DELIGHTFUL DAYS 
AT THE GRANGE 


tig, 


ag" a ie 








A WORD WITH THE READER 


Crowds of happy memories have poured into my mind 
as I have prepared these sermons and addresses for the 
press. The people who have listened always form a part 
of the discourse in the recollection of a public speaker. 
And so I have been once more meeting old friends and 
standing in places of noble memory as I have gone over 
the contents of this volume. 

My first visit to Birmingham, England, was a sort of 
pilgrimage to the church where the great Dr. Dale had 
preached and to the grave where he sleeps near to the 
British statesman, Joseph Chamberlain, the two, close 
friends in life and not far parted in death. Carrs Lane 
Church seems to this day full of the royal speech of 
Dr. Dale, of the sensitive and gracious preaching of 
Dr. Jowett, and of the wise and gripping and human 
words of Mr. Sidney Berry. It has been my happy lot 
to stand a good many times in this pulpit and to come 
to number the people of Carrs Lane among my friends. 
Here the sermons on the Conflicts of Ideals, Ideas, Experi- 
ences, and Salvations were preached in the summer of 
1922. “The Battle with Cynicism” was preached on one 
of my many visits to the City Temple in London. One 
looks up at the portrait of the leonine face of Dr. Parker. 
One gazes at the clear-cut features and the deep eyes of 
Dr. R. J. Campbell. One looks at the face of a man who 
is a thinker and a dreamer, that American of finely articu- 
lated mind, Dr. Joseph Fort Newton. One thinks of 
Dr. Frederick W. Norwood, whose voice from Australia 
now speaks with such trumpet notes of summons and such 
flute-like notes of sympathy in the great pulpit. One looks 
and thinks, then while the great organ plays, one enters 
the pulpit, understanding the wonder of its traditions and 
the impression of the distinguished preacher who said, 
“When I speak in the City Temple, I feel as if I were 


vii 


viii A WORD WITH THE READER 


addressing the British Empire.” The University of Chi- 
cago has its own gift of opportunity to offer to the men 
who preach in Mandell Hall. As I reread the “Pilgrim’s 
Progress of the Mind” I think of the delightful visits to 
this center of learning during a number of years. “Com- 
merce and Civilisation” was the baccalaureate sermon at 
Northwestern University in 1923. “The Making of the 
American Mind” was the baccalaureate sermon of the. 
Ohio State University the same year. “The Romance of 
Law” was an address at the Sunday Evening Club in 
Orchestra Hall, Chicago. ‘The Mind of the Preacher” 
was a commencement address at the Divinity School of 
Oberlin College. “The Intellectual Life of the College 
Graduate” was a commencement address at Albion Col- 
lege. ‘Freedom and Stability” was preached at Vassar 
College. All these in 1923. “Humanism and Religious 
Education” was an address at an annual meeting of the 
national body of the Universalist Church. “Pragmatic 
Christianity” was an address given as a fraternal delegate 
to the General Conference of the Canadian Methodist 
Church in 1922. “Making the World Our City” was_ 
preached in Sage Chapel of Cornell University. My first 
visit to Cornell was in the days when Andrew D. White 
was still alive, and his talk was rich and racy, sparkling 
with erudition and insight. Happy hours I have spent 
in the hospitable home of President Schurman after 
preaching in Sage Chapel, and I have felt the notable 
personal and intellectual qualities which President Far- 
rand is bringing to his great task. “The Imperial Voice” 
was preached in Westminster Congregational Church in 
London. ‘The Story of American Commerce” and “The 
Friendliness of the Universe” were preached in the Cen- 
tral Methodist Episcopal Church of Detroit, of which I 
have the great privilege and happiness to be pastor. And 
so with deep appreciation of friendly hearers on both sides 
of the sea, I send forth this book which is no longer mine 
if there are others who care to make its thoughts their own. 
Lynn Hazoxp Hovueu. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

TOLER LMELBIAL VOICH i sia, caer espe eri el ess 1 

vil. Tam Barren wira CyNIcIsM........ 13 

~ill; FREEDOM AND STABILITY. . 2.2. . 2... 22 

Babys) HE) CONFLICY OF IDBALS 4). 0 6). koa es 29 

Bony Lae CONFLICT OF IDBAS 2 ci. Fw) ee 39 

— VI. Tue CoNnFLicT or EXPERIENCES ...... 47 

- VII. Tue Conruict oF SALVATIONS’. ...... 56 

VIII. Toe Maxine or THE AMERICAN MIND... 64 

IX. THe Story oF AMERICAN COMMERCE... . 72 

X. COMMERCE AND CIVILISATION. ....... 80 

ae Drie CROMANCH.OF UAW fo atta p. Orel wie 87 

XII. Humanism AND ReELicious EpucaTION ... 93 

XIII. THe Pinerim’s Procress oF THE MIND. .. 98 
XIV. THe INTELLEcTUAL LIFE OF THE COLLEGE 

RADIAN IG Yo UG ie chide Mette cin SW URiotig tba re Cy 105 

XV. THe MIND oF THE PREACHER ....... 112 

TV RAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY §. 00; 20. ee os 119 

XVII. Maxine THE WoRLD OvuR City ...... 131 

— XVIII. Tot FRIENDLINESS OF THE UNIVERSE. . . . 138 














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THE IMPERIAL VOICE 





I 
THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


“The lion hath roared; who will not fear? The Lord Jehovah 
hath spoken; who can but prophesy?” Amos 3:8. 


We have all been thinking about the one hundredth 
anniversary of the death of the poet Shelley. Once again 
there has dwelt in our minds the thought of that rare and 
delicate and exotic spirit. The exquisite and ethereal 
quality of that verse which often seemed to capture and 
hold in gossamer words feelings too delicate for the rude 
roughness of human speech, the passion for perfection 
which burned like a quenchless fire in the heart of the 
poet, the spirit of revolt from a world whose grim brutali- 
ties were the contradiction of that ideal loveliness of which 
Shelley dreamed—all these have been in our minds as we 
have remembered that “ineffectual angel” of a hundred 
years ago. What exhaustless aspiration, what passionate 
futility, what wrathful scorn of things as they are, made 
the life of Shelley an inner tempest. Perhaps the pure 
Greek spirit, unsupplemented by inspiration from a higher 
region, can never do better than to perish with a broken 
heart amid the hostilities of an alien world, wrapping the 
mantle of its impossible dreams about it and refusing to 
surrender even in the hour of death. 

Over against all this there has been another spirit in 
the world. If it has not been at home in this planet, at 
least it has been at home in the universe. It has been 
saved from revolt by finding a God who has satisfied all 
its needs. It has found an authority which has enfran- 
chised its life even as it has commanded entire obedience. 
It has been saved from misanthropy because over against 

1 


2 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


-every human weakness it has found divine strength, and 
over against all the grim unloveliness it has caught a vision 
of the perfect harmony of the life of God. The thought 
of God has become mastering. It has become a luminous 
transforming experience which has interpreted life and 
has released boundless energies. 

Perhaps there is no better expression of this spirit than 
the vital fiery words of Amos: “The lion hath roared; 
who shall not fear? The Lord Jehovah hath spoken; who 
can but prophesy?” This eighth century prophet was a 
rude man of the open, quite innocent of all the delicate 
sophistication of a highly organised civilisation. He was 
busy with his sycamore trees and his sheep. His clear 
eyes wandered to the caravans moving on the highways 
near him or to the distant glimpse of the heights of Jeru- 
salem. His mind, as clear and as straight as his vision, 
moved among the problems of men, and with an almost 
terrible candour he brooded over the life of his age. Then 
alone in the wilderness he met the experience which made 
him know that God was speaking to him and that God 
would speak through him. His whole life bent under the 
passion and the power of it. And when he came to speak 
to men it was with the awful authority of a fresh and 
unmistakable contact with the will of the very Master of 
Life. 

So we have the two kinds of voices in the world. There 
is the voice of confused and scornful revolt, which ex- 
presses ideals but has no God. There is the voice of that 
deep and reverent worship which has found God, and so 
has in it the basis of every fertilising and enriching ideal. 
The one has the promise of the future in it. The other 
is at last a passionate regret for a world which can never be. 

The prophet Amos is more than a voice. He is one of 
a line of majestic voices. He belongs to an order of regal 
strength. Men of this order have kept hope alive in the 
world. They have kept humanity faithful in the long and 
terrible march through the wasting years. In every age 
of disillusionment and discouragement they have kept the 


THE IMPERIAL VOICE a 


flags floating high. They have been the saving element 
in the life of mankind. They have been the men of the 
Imperial Voice. 

We do not go back before the days of Amos. Only in 
passing do we remember the lonely splendour of Elijah’s 
battle and the near intimate human touch of Elisha’s 
ministry. In the eighth century itself Amos was but one 
of a group of men of the Imperial Voice. Over against 
the straight rude vigour of his speech was the lofty and 
sonorous utterance of that statesman prophet Isaiah. The 
one voice was as raw as the winds of the wilderness. The 
other had in it all the distinction of the hfe of the court. 
But each was a voice speaking for a God with a character. 
And each had the assurance which comes from a mastering 
personal contact with the will of God. 

The same age heard the poignant voice of Hosea, who, 
looking up out of a broken heart and a broken home, sud- 
denly knew what it meant to God to look upon the faith- 
lessness of Israel. The heartbreak of man became the 
interpretation of the heartbreak of Jehovah. And in the 
same eighth century, Micah, full of terrible wrath in the 
presence of social injustice, uttered a piercing cry of 
wrath in the name of God. For the wrongs of the poor 
were the wrongs of God. What an age of great voices it 
was. And we need to remember that it was a couple of 
centuries before the first Greek thinkers laid the founda- 
tions of philosophic speculation and before Prince Gau- 
tama founded a religion of brooding meditation in India, 
and Confucius in China founded a system which made 
ethics take the place of religion. 

The years passed quickly enough. And when the exile 
loomed like a dark cloud, it was that sensitively organised 
prophet, Jeremiah, who spoke the great words which 
caused Sir George Adam Smith to say of him that he 
reminds you of one of those shells whose shriek is heard 
above the noise of battle and whose very mission is per- 
formed in its explosion. His vicarious life brought a new 
idea into the mind of Israel. And a later prophet gave 


4 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


that idea immortal expression in the conception of the 
righteous servant who goes even to death in vicarious 
agony. When the exile was no longer a fear, but had 
become an experience, Ezekiel spoke with such beautiful 
hopefulness that the very sound of his voice delighted 
men. Then they paid him the dangerous compliment of 
admiring his method rather than of taking his message 
seriously. It was he who made the value of the individual 
soul in the eyes of God take on a new impressiveness. 
Jeremiah, too, had this vision. But under the pain of 
the exile the conception voiced in the words, “All souls 
are mine,” took on a new significance. We now see that 
it had the very heart of democracy in it. 

Other voices there were singing with encouragement 
or sharp with reprimand. And so we come out of the old 
days into the days when all things were to be made new. 
And the new days are ushered in as we might expect, by 
a man of the order of the Imperial Voice. He, too, has 
heard the lion roar. He, too, has heard Jehovah speak. 
It is a world with the evidence of the power of Rome 
everywhere, in which John the Baptizer speaks. It is 
a world with its own sense of sin and its own need of a 
word of hope and reconciliation. John has words which 
are swords. He has words which have their own hope. 
And as he speaks all Israel listens. 

Then the Master comes. And He, too, speaks. You 
cannot exhaust Him by putting Him in the order of the 
men of the Imperial Voice. But on one side of His life 
He does belong to that order. He gives conscience such 
words as conscience had never possessed before. He finds 
phrases of such divine simplicity and such matchless pene- 
tration that men marvel while He speaks. At last the 
words of men are enlarged until they are able to tell, in © 
quite a new way, the meaning of the will of God. Like 
armies His words march to battle. Like friends they wait 
for us with open arms. Like judges they pronounce moral 
verdicts. And like angels’ wings they flutter with the 
wonder of the divine love. Then what Jesus says is almost 


THE IMPERIAL VOICE 5 


lost in what He does. And the great deed which opens 
all the doors of hope to the world in chains is done. And 
the Shining Victor returns from the tomb for a golden 
moment of Victory ere He takes His place on the throne 
of power. 

The generation to whom these things became command- 
ing and authentic burst into speech. There were men of 
the Imperial Voice everywhere. We will only speak of 
one of them. Sometimes it is a difficult and expensive 
thing to train a voice. In that thriving commercial city 
of Tarsus the lad who played among the wharves and felt 
the distant echoes of its busy university life and went off 
to Jerusalem to be made a master in the learning of his 
own people did not suspect the future which awaited him. 
But bye and bye this highly trained young man came to 
his great hour. He saw the face of God in the face of the 
living Christ. He heard the voice of God in the voice of 
the risen Lord. And from that day his life was organised 
about a new centre. And soon he became the master of 
a voice of imperial power. In the great cities of the 
empire that voice was heard. Before judges and kings 
that masterful and skillful pleader spoke. And every- 
where he left behind men who knew that they had met 
with the very will of God when they heard him speak. 

So the new faith spread. And now Rome decayed and 
came toward its fall. But before the end there were men 
—not a few—who belonged to the tradition of the Imperial 
Voice. A brilliant and hot-blooded young North African 
drank his fill of hectic vices in city after city of the Empire 
until at last he, too, met his great hour. <A pursuing rest- 
lessness left his heart lonely, until the hour in the garden 
when he made the ultimate surrender. Then Augustine 
went forth a preacher and a teacher and a thinker, to 
become the schoolmaster of the Church for a thousand 
years. And if the Bishop of Hippo represented the great 
tradition in the West, John of the Golden Mouth repre- 
sented that same line of power in the East. First at 
Antioch, and then in the regal city of Constantinople, 


6 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


he made the Gospel commanding in his own inspired 
utterance. He had every grace of the trained rhetorician. 
But he had more. He, too, had fought his way through 
personal struggle to the great hour when he had met the 
Master of Life. He, too, had the right to say, “God hath 
spoken; who can but prophesy ?” 

The clouds gathered dark and heavy above the old civili- 
sation. And the hour came when they burst in terrible 
tempest. Rome fell. But the Christian Church survived 
the storm with a power which was to tame the barbarians 
and to preside at the making of modern Europe. — 

Once and again the men of power appeared. In the 
sixth century it was Benedict, with his skill to organise. 
In the eighth century it was Boniface, with his missionary 
zeal. In the eleventh century it was Anselm, with his 
subtle and understanding mind and his deeply devoted 
heart. 

Then came the thirteenth century, with all its glory for 
the life of the Church. It was the age of the far-flung 
authority of Innocent III. It was the age of the brilliant, 
intellectual achievement of the Summa of Saint Thomas 
Aquinas. But from the standpoint of our thought this 
morning, it was pre-eminently the age of that singing and 
winsome spirit, Saint Francis of Assisi. Amid sordidness 
and selfish ambition, Saint Francis fell in love with all 
the unselfish beauty of the life of Jesus, and set about 
making that life his very own. Not as an ascetic, but as 
one full of the very rapture of living, he served the lowly 
and the outcast, and set the very life of his age to the 
music of a new gladness. Even architecture felt the 
inspiration of the new movement. In one age everywhere 
grinning gargoyles had appeared. After the influence of 
the Franciscans had become pervasive the gargoyles van- 
ished from the new buildings. In their place there were 
rapturous angels’ faces full of beatific joy. The Gospel 
was never more happily winsome than in this revival of 
the thirteenth century, the very heart of which was the 
preaching of Saint Francis. 


THE IMPERIAL VOICE 7 


The fourteenth century saw break up and confusion 
everywhere. It was the age of the papal captivity at 
Avignon. It was the age of the great schism. It was 
the age when it became evident that the Church, which 
was set up for the healing of the world, itself needed a 
physician. And now in England there arose a leader, 
wise with all the dialectical skill of the scholastic philoso- 
phy and clear-eyed as well, to see the meaning of the 
moral and spiritual problems of the Church of his age. 
Wyclif made his voice an instrument of far-flung power. 
And through his organisation of the Lollards he gave 
preaching a new place in English life. The Bible began 
to speak in the very tongue of the people, and the Church 
was appraised with a fearless honesty in the light of the 
standards which came from the Book alive with the life 
of God. 

In the fifteenth century, a follower of Wyclif in Bo- 
hemia bore valiant witness to the new thoughts about 
God and man which were stirring men’s minds. And 
when Hus, who had preached so valiantly at Prague, at 
last gave his life to seal his testimony, another stage was 
reached in the battle between the Book and the Church. 
In Florence, Savonarola became master prophet and mar- 
tyr before the century came to an end. 

The sixteenth century brings a perfect galaxy of Im- 
perial voices. Luther, the peasant prophet, with the 
richness of the soil in his speech and the wisdom of the 
schools upon his lips, came in his turn to an experience 
of the present and forgiving power of God in Jesus Christ, 
which changed everything in the world for him. The 
lion had indeed roared, and he could no more fear the 
human lions who dwelt within the Church. The Lord 
Jehovah had spoken, and now the living word of prophecy 
must be uttered. So the Reformation was born. Zwinglli, 
the humanist, who was also a reformer, brought the tribute 
of the new learning to the Gospel, and gave a highly 
trained mind to the service of the emancipation of the 
Christian forces of his city. Calvin, the master of precise 


8 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


thinking and cogent expression, had produced an immortal 
theological masterpiece, whose quality was essentially 
unchanged by later additions and revisions, before he 
reached the age of thirty. His word became the law of 
Geneva. And once again the Imperial Voice was mightier 
than the Imperial Church. Knox, with his shrewd, hard- 
headed wisdom, and his devotion to the evangel, not only 
made his pulpit a throne, and gave a new religious life 
to his people, but founded anew the life of a nation, and 
impressed upon it the essential quality of its civilisation. 
There are many minor stars in the constellations of the 
sixteenth century. It was an age of Imperial Voices, 
because the human spirit had found a new freedom in a 
great experience of contact with the living God. 

The seventeenth century contains elements of reaction. 
It is the period of Louis XIV. It is the time when for 
multitudes of people good taste takes the place of good 
character. And even some of the great preachers of the 
period give one the sense of bowing at the shrine of rhetoric 
even as they bow at the shrine of a deeper devotion. But 
the best of the French preachers do care deeply for the 
moral beauty of goodness as well as for the gracious love- 
liness of finely wrought phrases. This same century, 
however, sees Puritanism become a genuine power. There 
is a man named John Robinson, who opens all the win- 
dows of his mind and sees new light continually breaking 
from God’s word. There is a man named John Bunyan, 
who captures all the pith and energy of the rich vernacular 
English speech, and pouring the passion of his own relig- 
ious experience into words creates a religious masterpiece, 
which will live as long as men hear the voice of conscience 
and hunger for the friendliness of God. 

The eighteenth century sees new winds blowing upon 
the hearts of men from the heights divine. The century 
before had felt the warming currents of Pietism, and now, 
in the very age when Deism was teaching men to believe 
in a God who had gone away and a man who was sufiicient 
to his own needs, the great revival swept its way among 


THE IMPERIAL VOICE 9 


the men of England and out over the waste places of 
America. The precise little Oxford scholar, who was 
always a gentleman as well as an evangelist, did not have 
his heart strangely warmed in vain. It was the beginning 
of the strange warming of the heart of all the nation. 
And that dramatic master of men, who knew all the 
potencies of persuasive speech, startling even my Lord 
Chesterfield by his terribly vivid power, did not in vain 
come to know the meaning of the peace of God. When 
these men had done their work, a new England, with 
cleansed and understanding eyes, looked out upon the 
world. And in America the apostles of the saddle-bags 
were ready to baptise every infant village in the name 
of the forgiving Christ. 

The nineteenth century had its own tale of Imperial 
Voices to tell. Men began to think deeply of the relation 
of the Christian motive and the Christian fellowship with 
God to all the relations of men. Such sensitive and 
prophetic spirits as Kingsley and Maurice began to dream 
of the social implications of the Gospel and to speak words 
to which men alive to the summons of a new contact with 
reality must give heed. The Free Churches came to be 
possessed of a type of high and commanding leadership, 
well represented by the extraordinary ministry of Dr. 
Robert William Dale, for so many years the minister of 
Carrs Lane Church in Birmingham. With an inner life 
all full of the consciousness of the presence of the living 
Christ, and of His right to reign in all the relations of 
men, with a civic and a social conscience developed to 
acute capacity for perception, with a literary style built 
into a sort of splendour of expression which brought regal 
words to a regal message, and built up periods which stood 
forth like cedars in strength and beauty, Dale commanded 
the attention, not only of his city and of his country, but | 
at last became an influence all over the English-speaking 
world. His pulpit was a throne, and young men felt as 
they heard him that the most splendid thing in all the 


10 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


world was the exercise of the moral and spiritual authority 
of a Christian preacher. 

London had its own princes of the pulpit. Liddon, with 
his potent voice, made Saint Paul’s more than a noble 
cathedral. It became the home of a living voice. Joseph 
Parker, who stood like a lion in the pulpit of the City 
Temple, uttered words which were carried forth by all 
the winds that blow. Spurgeon, with his deep sense of 
the evangel, his racy speech, and his human touch, brought 
religion to the very lives from which it had seemed 
austerely remote. And in the midst of all this splendour 
of Christian speech men were not forgetting the martial 
energy and the luminous interpretation, and the quick 
forward thrust of the mind which had made the ministry 
of Frederick W. Robertson so memorable at Brighton. 
In America, Phillips Brooks was standing in Trinity 
Church, in Boston, with a gracious and high urbanity 
which made Christianity speak to men with a new and 
commanding dignity, and an immediate and satisfying 
power. 

And now we are almost upon our own time. Of that 
we will not speak. It is not necessary to prove the pres- 
ence of Imperial Voices in a Church* where the fresh 
and vital exposition of the Bible with speech of memorable 
clarity and luminous insight year after year made the 
Old and New Testaments vivid and authentic to multi- 
tudes to whom their language had become a foreign tongue, 
and deepened the devotion of those to whom the Book of 
God was the supreme treasure of life. It is not necessary 
to convince a congregation that preaching can be charac- 
terised by memorable power when that congregation has 
listened to the speech of a prophet whose spirit has all 
the sensitive and gracious spiritual charm of lilies of the 
valley blooming in places hidden from the rude storms of 
life, and all the tried and abiding power which comes 
from the faithful and unhesitating meeting of life’s tem- 
pests in a torn and broken age. When the most delicate 


* Westminster Congregational Church, London. 


THE IMPERIAL VOICE 11 


art ceases to be art, because it becomes devotion, and the 
most brooding spirituality becomes a human resource 
applied to the needs of hard-pressed men and women, the 
pulpit achieves a new sort of power. 

So the ages have come into the age. So the past has 
unfolded into the present. And in this world, shattered 
by the war and heavy with the gloom of broken hearts 
and the sadness of sordid and selfish sinning, it is infinitely 
good to remember that in every age, when tragedy has 
taken its place upon the throne of the world, the Imperial 
Voice has spoken. With this tradition behind us we do 
not dare to surrender to shattering fear or to dark misan- 
thropy as we confront the day in which we live. The 
Imperial Voice will speak again. And its message will 
glow with triumphant life. 

One thing we must not forget. The message of the 
Imperial Voice when it has the deepest Christian quality 
is always a message of redemption. It is not new knowl- 
edge which is to save mankind. It is regeneration made 
actual in the life of our day which is to give us a new 
world. We are all interested in the collection, for the 
making safe and solid of the dome of Saint Paul’s. I 
cannot avoid the symbolism of it all. Sir Christopher 
Wren may have been deceived, we are told. At any rate, 
in place after place back of the piers which look so solid 
there is material incapable of bearing the strain of the 
great dome. It is nothing you can see. When the repairs 
have been made the result will not be visible to the naked 
eye. But an inner source of weakness, which is a danger 
and a menace, and which left alone would bring the great 
dome to the ground at last, will have to be dealt with in 
such a fashion that all is strong and sound and sure. So 
it is with men. So it is with cities. So it is with nations. 
We have built great and imposing domes. It is all splen- 
did and wonderful to the outer eye. But back of the piers, 
which look so solid, there is material which will not bear 
the strain. The work of repair must be done if the dome 
is to stand. In the inner places of our lives solid strength 


12 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


must take the place of that frail material which will give 
way in the hour of strain. The Imperial Voice has many 
great words to say to us. The greatest of all is the word 
which speaks the needed message when we have found 
the inner weakness of our lives. That word is the perpet- 
ual summons of the grace of Christ. That word possesses 
the secret of the noble dome which will never fall. 

We will not confront life with the futile revolt of that 
spirit which can only turn in wrath from a universe which 
can never satisfy. We belong to the tradition of the 
Imperial Voice. We believe in the God who gives power 
to that voice. We know that it will be equal to every 
need of our age. So we wait. So we will listen. And 
when once more we hear the words, ‘““The lion hath roared; 
who shall not fear? The Lord Jehovah hath spoken; who 
can but prophesy?” we shall be ready to heed the mes- 
senger and we shall be ready to obey. 


IT 
THE BATTLE WITH CYNICISM 


“Therefore I turned about to cause my heart to despair concerning 
all the labour wherein I had laboured under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 


PAN 

“Yet I will rejoice in Jehovah, I will joy in the God of my salva- 
tion. Jehovah, the Lord, is my strength; and He maketh my feet 
like hinds’ feet, and will make me to walk upon my high places.” 
Habakkuk III, 18, 19. 


There are some rather disconcerting features in the 
Book of Ecclesiastes. It has been called the cellar of the 
Old Testament. One is inclined to wonder how the book 
ever managed to get into the canon. If books could be 
diplomats, one would be inclined to feel that all sorts of 
shrewd sagacity must have been exercised by this particu- 
lar bit of writing to get into the society of the great Old 
Testament prophets. The contrast between its selfish 
disillusionment and the glorious outburst of faith which 
closes the poem at the end of the little Book of Habakkuk 
could not be more sharply drawn. On the one side there 
is the play of a mind without moral depth or spiritual 
height. It moves through life with an observant eye. 
Someone has described a cynic as a man who knows the 
price of everything and the value of nothing. The sudden 
flashes of insight which come from inner greatness of 
spirit never appear in the Book of Ecclesiastes. And the 
references to God have an artificial and conventional ring. 
So life is surveyed and found wanting. So in a dull and 
colourless world a waning and decadent spirit looks out in 
despair. It is, indeed, the cellar of the Old Testament. 
The air is damp and the whole place is unhealthy. One 
is glad, however, the book is there. It sharpens contrasts 

13 


14 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


which we might not otherwise feel in their full signifi- 
cance. But we turn with a sense of leaving a place of 
decay to the sharper air and the high perspectives which 
we find in the great and adventurous faith of the prophets. 
We pick up the little song in the Book of Habakkuk and 
turn to its last lyric outburst. There is the frightful 
sound of invading armies. The fruits of the earth and 
the grain of the field are failing. The flocks and the 
herds are dying. And in the midst of it all the trium- 
phant spirit of a great believer lifts itself in a perfect 
hallelujah chorus of triumphant faith. In spite of it all, 
he will rejoice in God. In spite of it all, Jehovah is his 
strength. And even in this hour of unspeakable calamity 
he is given the feet of a hind and moves in safety among 
the perilous high places of the earth. 

The two attitudes represented by these two utterances 
do perpetual battle in the world. The men of heavy eyes 
and cynical disillusionment are all the while meeting the 
men of triumphant and adventurous faith upon the battle- 
fields of the world. I confess that I feel a certain embar- 
rassment in speaking of these things this morning. ‘The 
world has been torn and shattered by the disintegrating 
power of the Great War. England has bent under a 
burden the depth of whose tragic woe only England knows. 
During the last months of the war I went about among 
your cities and among your homes. I shall never forget 
the brave and quiet good cheer with which you moved 
through the days of blackness, lighted with the swift hght- 
ning of bitter pain. You have a way of hiding the shining 
splendour of your ideals and the searching tragedy of your 
sufferings behind a reticence which goes steadily about 
its work, and meets life with a cool and steady courage 
which seeks no expression in words. But in those days 
one saw through the protective colouring of restraint and 
caught glimpses of the soul of England. It made him 
feel like taking off his sandals because he was standing 
on holy ground. And now in the years of cruel reaction, 
if you are tempted to enter upon an experience of complete 


THE BATTLE WITH CYNICISM 15 


and bitter disillusionment, if you are lifting terribly pene- 
trating questions about God and man and the nations of 
the world, and if the reply seems hard with the cold 
cynicism of a disappointed hope, can a man from the 
outside come in and speak of it all? Especially if he 
comes from a nation which entered the war very late and 
then in the hard days of the confusing peace, by some 
strange turn of the public mind, failed tragically to take 
its share in the burden which must be borne if the world 
is to be made stable—can a man coming so bring you a 
message to which you will be willing to listen in respect of 
those terribly bitter experiences? One would be inclined 
to say quite frankly that such a thing would be impossible 
anywhere except in the Christian Church. But a Chris- 
tian pulpit does transcend time and space. And if a man 
is sure that he has a message which God has given him, 
he can dare to give it even under these difficult conditions, 
knowing that if it is given with honesty and utter sin- 
cerity, it will be heard with respect and it will be under- 
stood. So deeply trusting you this morning, I enter upon 
a discussion of the battle between cynicism and faith upon 
the great field of the world. 

First of all, shall we take a look at some characteristic 
expressions of the two attitudes toward life? Surely the 
best approach to the present in these hard matters is by 
the appeal to that treasure-house of human experience 
called history which is such a rich possession when we 
truly enter into our inheritance. We remember how the 
fifth century before the coming of our Lord saw a won- 
derful outburst of the greatest and the most gracious 
things of the human spirit. It was the age of the Persian 
invasions and of the Greek victories. It was the age of 
Pericles, with all its noble art and its glorious architecture. 
It was the age when human speech was built into a palace 
of writing, where the human mind could wander through 
marvellous chambers of melodious sentences built into 
periods of harmonious loveliness. It was the age of the 
penetrating and enquiring mind of Socrates. But it was 


16 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


also the age of the Sophists who, as a class, believed 
nothing deeply, and were possessed of that sordid mental 
ingenuity which comes to a man when he has no convic- 
tions and no commanding ideals. As you look into the 
mind of the Sophist, you see the very genius of the thing 
we now mean when we use the word cynic. Upon the 
surface of one of the greatest periods of the world’s life 
the disillusioned Sophist moved shrewdly, playing his 
little game of intellectual make-believe without conscience 
and without the lifting power of moral or spiritual enthu- 
siasm. Then comes the terrible day of the end of the 
Athenian supremacy. And the weakness of .the Greek 
states begins to foretell a day of doom. It is a time which, 
indeed, tests the spirit of those who know and love the 
genius of Attica. -Hope itself seems to be blown away 
like the frail petals of a lovely flower tossed carelessly 
by the cold hardness of autumn winds. And in this pre- 
cise situation lives a Greek who most perfectly expresses 
the rarest and noblest qualities of the spirit of his race. 
There is everything to make him a cynic. But instead 
he becomes the author of some of the noblest writing of 
creative hope to be found anywhere in all the world. He 
escapes from the sordid selfishness of the day into a sub- 
lime vision of that ultimate reality in which goodness 
and beauty are one. He escapes from time into eternity. 
By an audacious act of faith he secures a belief that the 
invisible good is more real than the visible evil. So Plato, 
like the singer whose lyric closes the Book of Habakkuk, 
becomes the prophet of a singing joy in an age when dark- 
ness and disappointment settle heavily upon the world. 
We must choose between the spirit of the cynical Sophist 
and the spirit of Plato. Which shall it be? 

In the days of the greatness of the Roman Empire Lu- 
cretius wrote that memorable poem, ““De Rerum Natura.” 
It has many qualities of charm. It holds the imagination 
by a curious secret of quiet and observant contemplation 
combined with noble grace of phrase. But it is at heart 
a poem of disillusionment. It has the soul of cynicism in 


THE BATTLE WITH CYNICISM 17 


it. There is no adventurous belief in life. There is no 
high and leaping confidence that spirit is stronger than 
matter. There is no glowing assurance that good is 
mightier than evil. There is only the cold and dignified 
acceptance of an evil lot. There is only the emancipation 
which is the death of all generous and creative enthusiasm. 
No glorious and prophetic lives have been inspired by 
Lucretius. No high self-sacrifice has come from the foun- 
tains which he set playing. He is still the refuge of those 
who seek a cold and urbane philosophy in which to dwell 
while they live lives of philosophic selfishness, ignoring 
every poignant cry of human need. 

The day came when the great structure of the Roman 
Empire was about to fall. The creaking of timbers was 
heard everywhere. Sometimes a pillar fell crumbling 
down, and sometimes the roof or a part of the building 
came crashing to the ground. It seemed as if civilisation 
itself was about to perish in the disintegration of Rome. 
And right in the midst of all the confusion, when there 
seemed no solid earth upon which to stand, a powerful 
voice was lifted. It was the voice of a man who might 
easily have become the victim of misanthropic gloom. He 
knew the meaning of that civilisation which was decaying. 
He possessed the most powerful and highly articulated 
mind to be found in the world of his day. But just when 
the city of man was breaking up, and its streets were full 
of turmoil and horror, Augustine wrote “De Civatate Dei.” 
Over against the crumbling city of human construction 
he put the eternal city which is the creation of Almighty 
God. In the very break-up of civilisation he found sources 
of triumphant hope. It was the first great Christian phi- 
losophy of history. And it scorned every temptation to 
the heavy misanthropy of that disintegrating doubt which 
destroys the spirit of man. It was full of the music of 
a great confidence. It was full of the splendour of a death- 
less hope. We must choose between the spirit of Lucretius 
and the spirit of Augustine. Which shall it be? 

If we go far afield we shall find a brilliant cynic in 


18 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


Persia. Probably most men would not know very much 
about him if a nineteenth-century poet, whose mind moved 
in the same trails, had not put his musical misanthropy 
into lovely English verse. As it is, the contemporary 
cynic, especially the very young cynic who has a bit of 
self-conscious intellectuality about him, finds his mood 
expressed with distinction and grace and beauty in the 
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There is complete disil- 
lusionment. There is the repudiation of hope. There are 
flashes of dark and terrible wrath. There are songs of 
the abandon of indulgence. There is the pathos of a 
sensitive spirit as a refuge making beautiful sentences 
in an ugly world, ready to sleep at last with an upturned 
empty glass above it, the symbol of its indulgence and 
the symbol of its futility. This marvellous poem has 
never girded men for hard warfare. It has never taught 
them to see stars in the dark night. It has set their doubts 
to music. It has made their misanthropy articulate. It 
has lifted their most weak and hopeless moods into a 
philosophy of life. 

Coming back from Persia and looking in on the Europe 
of the thirteenth century, we find a surface of much bril- 
liancy with many seeds of decay under the dazzling 
exterior. The far-flung glory of Innocent III, the con- 
summate achievement of the Summa, the rise of the uni- 
versities do not conceal from us that inner decay which is 
to make itself felt so tragically in the fourteenth century. 
But there is one mighty and creative spirit. There is 
one personality which maintains secrets of permanent 
enthusiasm. Saint Francis did not have a great mind. 
He does not indeed have much of a mind at all, but he 
has a heart. And with glorious and child-like simplicity 
he finds his way into the heart of God. All men become 
his brothers indeed. All living things are received into 
his great family. All inanimate things are his brothers 
and sisters. And so he goes singing and serving about 
Italy and out over the world. No disease is so loathsome, 
no poverty so terrible, but he comes with the healing 


THE BATTLE WITH CYNICISM 19 


helpfulness of his loving heart and his eager hand. So 
in an age when selfishness and sophistication and unscru- 
pulous sordidness were seizing the world Saint Francis 
sang men back to innocence and love and the belief in 
goodness and truth and God. We must choose between 
the spirit of Omar Khayyam and the spirit of Saint 
Francis. Which shall it be? 

Probably some observers would imagine that America 
has been so busy with tremendously energetic action that 
these deep and brooding problems of thought and feeling 
have not come within the range of its experience. But it 
has not been so. The nineteenth century witnessed the 
unfolding of a life among us which as we look back arouses 
a curious interest. That volume of brilliant autobiogra- 
phy, “The Education of Henry Adams,” tells the story. 
Here was a man, the descendant of two able Presidents 
of the United States. He had every advantage of training 
and travel and contact with the best minds of many lands. 
Harvard University put its mark of discipline upon him, 
and it seemed as if heredity and opportunity and personal 
gifts united to make him a man of the greatest promise. 
Out of it all he wrought a cold and half disdainful cyn- 
icism, which left him incapable of creative thought and 
helpless in the presence of the moment which demanded 
the masterful deed. As one reads the exquisitely wrought 
and penetrating phrases of distinguished disillusionment, 
which make his autobiography so memorable, one feels a 
wistful longing for one self-forgetful moment of high and 
assured enthusiasm. But the golden moment never comes. 

There was a man in America at the same time, a good 
deal older than Henry Adams. He was born in the wilder- 
ness. He grew up without advantages and without oppor- 
tunities. He knew no such university of stately traditions 
as Harvard. A crude and ugly and common man, he lived 
among hard-pressed men and women who knew nothing 
of the graces and beauties of life. He read every book 
he could find. He knew the Declaration of Independence 
and the Constitution of the United States. He knew his 


20 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


Bible. And he knew his Shakespeare. And he received 
every great and noble ideal of which he read into a simple 
and believing heart. He kindled a glorious fire in his 
soul as he read these great masterpieces. So without grace 
and with only the hard and demanding breeding of the 
wilderness, he strode into the White House in the day 
of his nation’s need. He has kept on travelling, for not so 
long ago you welcomed that tall gaunt figure, with eternal 
tragedy and eternal hope in his face, to stand among 
your men of imperishable memory in Parliament Square. 
In spite of his cruel childhood, in spite of his terrible 
handicaps, he believed in men, he believed in God, he 
believed in the future. And so the world has received him 
among its few peerless men. We must choose between the 
spirit of Henry Adams and the spirit of Abraham Lincoln. 
Which shall it be? 

And now let us come back to the book which lies on 
this desk, from which perhaps we have been wandering 
too long. One day two men stood confronting each other. 
One was a brilliantly disciplined man of the world. He 
was a Roman trained in the masterful traditions of Roman 
rule. There was something high and commanding and 
massive in his very bearing. But he was a cynic at heart. 
He had no inner sources of moral or spiritual power. 
With cavalier and careless speech he queried lightly: 
“What is truth?” The man beside him was strong in 
the strength of life in the open. His face was full of the 
wonder of human friendliness, and winsome with a stern 
yet gentle purity which seemed the very wedlock of ten- 
derness and power. His eyes had a clear richness which 
made you feel that you were looking into eternity as you 
gazed into their depths. Goodness was alive in Him. 
Purity was alive in Him. Love was alive in Him. And 
as He stood before the weak and selfish wordling hiding 
behind a habit of Roman dignity, he seemed to tower 
above the governor, who thought he held His fate in his 
hands. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus. 
And as we listen to His words we seem suddenly in the 


THE BATTLE WITH CYNICISM 21 


presence of an order of reality higher, vaster, more potent 
than all the sordid disillusionments of the weary and 
selfish world. The light of a Divine assurance was in 
the eyes of the Master. The steadiness of a perfect assur- 
ance was in His voice. We must choose between the spirit 
of Pilate and the spirit of Jesus. Which shall it be? 

And now come back to our own day. The world lies 
torn and confused all about us. There is the breakdown 
of nations. There is the disintegration of ancient sanc- 
tions. There is the far-flung passion of broken hearts. 
There is all the bitter disillusionment of these terrible 
years. ‘The voice of the cynic in Ecclesiastes seems to 
express the very spirit of the time: “Therefore I turned 
about to cause my heart to despair concerning all the 
labour wherein I had laboured under the sun.” But we 
cannot forget the other voice. The fearful armies are 
advancing. The product of the land is failing and life 
itself is ebbing. But the trumpet of faith is blown lke 
a call to a victorious charge. God is still the God of 
salvation. He is the strength of suffering and hard- 
pressed men. He gives them feet of fleetness and power 
to move upon the high places of the world. Oh, you 
English people, in the name of your noblest traditions, in 
the name of that Christian heroism which has so greatly 
adorned your land, turn from the ways of cynicism to the 
ways of faith. It is not with the heart of Pilate, but with 
the heart which the living Christ creates, that we are to 
master the present and create the future and achieve the 
victory of goodness and love. Our feet are yet to be made 
fleet to walk upon the high places of the earth. 


III 
FREEDOM AND STABILITY 


“For freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast, therefore, and be 
not entangled again in a yoke of bondage.” Galatians 5: 1. 


One looks at a galaxy of brilliant figures when one sur- 
veys the life of the Early Roman Empire. Augustus, 
who found Rome brick and left it marble, was surrounded 
by men whose qualities of mind and taste make them 
memorable characters. And the years which followed also 
saw the coming and the going of many a masterful and 
significant personality. Among all the men who moved 
through the life of the Empire in the first century of its 
existence two are especially in my mind this morning. 
One of them is the great poet Virgil. The other is the 
Apostle Paul. | 

We remember Lord Tennyson’s noble tribute to the 
Latin poet: 


“Landscape lover, lord of language, more than he that sang the 
works and days, 


All the chosen coin of fancy flashing forth from many a golden 
phrase. 


“Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar’s dome, 
Tho’ thine ocean roll of rhythm sounds forever of Imperial Rome. 


“T salute thee, Mantorana, I that loved thee since my day began, 
Wielder of the stateliest measure, ever moulded by the mind of 
man. 


The lovely music, the exquisite grace, the splendid 
beauty of Virgil’s writing, do not at the moment command 
our attention so much as the fact that he was conspicu- 
ously the poet who set benevolent autocracy to music. 

22 


FREEDOM AND STABILITY 23 


Born in the Republic, seeing the decay of its institutions, 
caught in the turbulent swirl of the waters in a confusing 
and difficult age, he came to fear a great fear, he came 
to believe that society itself might fall apart. He came 
to apprehend the possibility that civilisation itself might 
vanish from the world. And so deeply did he fear anarchy 
that he became willing to accept a gracious and noble 
tyranny as a means of escape from the dissolution of the 
orderly life of the world. He gave himself with undivided 
heart to the work of clothing the benevolent tyranny of 
Augustus with a garment of grace and beauty and charm. 
He believed in a world made one by the power of Imperial 
Rome. And in that unity he saw the coming to blossom 
of all the fair and gracious things of orderly and beautiful 
life. Rome was to be a stone wall about the blooming 
garden of the world. When we are thinking of the vision 
of world unity which came to Dante and which he ex- 
pressed in his memorable Latin work, ““De Monarchia,” we 
must not forget his love for Virgil. As a matter of fact 
the poet who conducted Dante through the “Inferno” and 
the “Purgatorio” had a very profound relation to his whole 
intellectual life. And even today many who have never 
connected their thoughts with Virgil dream of a world 
order built upon some sort of benevolent and absolute 
authority which shall make a place for order and beauty 
in the world. 

The other figure from the first century of the life of 
- the Roman Empire of whom I am thinking this morning 
is different enough from the gracious and urbane poet 
who was the friend of Augustus. But he was a man widely 
travelled who had become familiar with many minds in 
many lands. He was a citizen of the Empire. He was 
a scholar and he was a gentleman who carried himself with 
fine fitness and gracious amenity in the presence of kings. 

The Apostle Paul represented an extremely conserva- 
tive, not to say a hard and rigid, tradition. His nation 
had wrought out a certain moral and spiritual isolation 
as the very condition of receiving and appropriating that 


24 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


quality of thought and life which was to be its great mes- 
sage to the world. But this noble isolation had at length 
become a barren and bigoted and unlovely thing. The 
mind of the Jew was perpetually secreting the chains 
which held him fast. To be sure, there were Jews who 
loved the light which came from Hellas, but Paul’s mind 
received its bent from those to whom the Hebrew past 
mattered most. Although he studied under the liberal 
Gamaliel, he became the bright hope of the party of im- 
movable loyalty to that Hebrew past and of entire distrust 
of foreign influences. Then a strange thing came to pass. 
This astoundingly briliant young Jewish Tory found his 
inner life full of dissatisfaction and unrest. He chafed 
against the chains of stately and conservative tradition. 
He believed in the ancient solidarities. His heart panted 
for freedom while he led the party of remorseless loyalty 
to the past. And all the while he had a divided mind and 
a divided will. He set himself against the newly formed 
Christian movement. But his eye was burning with the 
fever of inner conflict and his heart was hot with con- 
tending emotions even when he was playing the réle of 
relentless persecutor. Then the crisis came to its burning 
moment of revealing ight. And out of it Paul came, the 
ambassador of a new sovereign, the messenger of a newly 
accepted king. And the outstanding note of his new 
experience, the profound inspiration of his new activity 
was a glowing and increasing sense of emancipation. The 
deliverance from a divided will into a life of joyous free- 
dom made the world a new place for Paul. He went about 
destroying ancient prejudices and casting down walls of 
superstition, hoary with age. He was the apostle of a 
joyous liberty. ‘For freedom did Christ set us free” 
was a characteristic utterance of the experience which 
set him travelling about the Roman Empire everywhere 
breaking chains, everywhere kindling fires for the warming 
of human hearts. 

Virgil began as a citizen of a Republic. He ended, the 
apostle of a gracious yet unbending tyranny. Paul began 


FREEDOM AND STABILITY 25 


as the leader of a group of passionate reactionaries who 
above all things regarded their ancient sanctions. He 
ended, the flaming evangelist of a glorious emancipation. 
So while in the writings of Virgil we read the loveliest 
poetry made the vehicle of the idealising of autocracy, 
in the writings of Paul we read the insurgent joy of a 
new freedom going forth to do battle with all which binds 
the mind and heart and will of man. 

The passion for freedom is very familiar in the contem- 
porary world. The human spirit is beating against the 
bars in every part of modern civilised society. And out 
of all this restless yeast of desire many strange things have 
come to the society oi which we are a part. Old sanctions 
are cast aside with little examination. Old customs are 
discredited because their locks are hoary. Nothing is 
accepted upon authority. Everything must prove itself 
in the midst of the endless contentions which characterise 
the vivid and hungry life through which we move. 

One can easily see that much good has come from all 
this zest for fresh and free examination of every experi- 
ence of life. Many an ancient superstition has gone crash- 
ing to its doom. Many an ancient prejudice has been 
drawn and quartered and so the world breathes more 
freely. Many an old sanction has been seen in new and 
splendid relations. A kind of masterful sincerity has 
swept over the world. The human spirit turns its enquir- 
_ Ing eyes with a new honesty upon the vastness of human 

thought and activity. 

But when all this has been gladly admitted it seems 
that there may be a good deal more which ought to be 
said. Some pressing and at times disconcerting questions 
lift themselves. We can scarcely care to attempt to deny 
or avoid the fact that a good many fierce and energetic 
spirits have cast aside the very inhibitions which in previ- 
ous centuries have formed a sort of cement to hold society 
together. There have been passionate-eyed young enthu- 
siasts to whom the new freedom has meant emancipation 
from all human responsibility, to whom self-realisation 


26 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


has meant the right to go trampling over every human 
thought and feeling which has dared to stand in the way 
of their hot energy of self-assertion. There are those to 
whose intense and eager minds the ten commandments 
seem an impertinence and the golden rule a piece of 
archaic sentimentality. We are likely to view these apos- 
tles of revolt with a good deal of uneasiness. And as their 
voices become more strident and their demands more 
imperative, we may be tempted to follow in the path of 
Virgil and to turn in fear from the love of freedom driven 
into a panic by the fear of anarchy. The indiscretions 
of the Liberal form the basis for the platform of the Tory. 

If we are not contented to be swept along by emotions 
of wrathful distrust we shall come to see that the solution 
of the reactionary is, after all, a dangerous thing. The 
fierce radical reduces life to anarchy. The hard Tory 
turns life into a prison. And though fair flowers may 
climb over the bars of the prison windows and lovely vines 
hang upon its grey walls, it is a prison for all that. 

We begin to feel that each solution is so full of menace 
that for a time, in sheer fright, we may be inclined to 
move like a shuttlecock from one to the other. It is easy 
to want to be a Tory when you view the sins of the radi- 
cals. It is easy to want to be a radical when you view 
the sins of the Tories. 

Then we are reminded of the solution which is sug- 
gested by the experience of the Apostle Paul. With all 
his dashing heroism in destroying old prejudices, he gives 
us a curious feeling of solidity. It never occurs to him 
that a man needs to trample upon unselfishness in order 
to be free. Indeed it is only in noble self-forgetfulness 
that he finds freedom for himself and attempts to secure 
it for others. It never occurs to him that he must break 
the ten commandments in order to prove his freedom. In 
fact the central characteristic of his freedom lies precisely 
in the fact that it sets the ten commandments to music. 
He has not discovered a new morality. He has discovered 
a new spirit by which to transfigure the old morality. 


FREEDOM AND STABILITY 27 


All this suggests a little closer analysis of that restless 
wrath in the presence of inhibitions which is so vocal all 
about the world today. And when we come to use the 
instruments of clear and unhesitating examination, we 
discover that it is not the content of the great command- 
ments which come dripping with the deepest ethical and 
spiritual experience of the race to which we object. It is 
the element of coercion which arouses our antagonism. 
There is something very deep in the human heart which 
resents an arbitrary will enforced from without. The 
moment we think of any experience as something we must 
do instead of as something we love to do we begin to desire 
to avoid the necessity. If two enthusiastic friends sud- 
denly begin to think of the demanding duties involved 
in their relation rather than of its delightful privi- 
leges the whole experience begins to wane and lose its 
charm. We are glad to offer as a gift that for which we 
would fight if it were extorted as a tribute. As a matter 
of fact the world never tires of spontaneous and joyous 
goodness. It wearies very soon of hard and mechanical 
and coerced obedience. It was the glorious thing about 
the insight of Paul that he came to understand that what 
he had needed was a new devotion and not a new set of 
moral sanctions. His new master made the moral law a 
friend and not a tyrant. And the moment he learned to 
love goodness as a friend instead of fearing it as a hard 
autocrat all the world was changed for him. It was not 
an emancipation from law. It was an emancipation in 
law. For when once you learn to love the law, all the 
elements of hard coercion disappear from its sanctions. 
You have all the sense of freedom which the anarchist is 
seeking at the very moment when you are giving to the 
law the most unhesitating obedience. And your obedience 
is far more perfect as the gift of love than it ever could 
be as the tribute of fear. 

It is in this fashion that freedom is reconciled with 
solidarity, that liberty makes peace with law. To be sure, 
Paul is not the first person to understand the way out of 


28 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


this difficult human dilemma. Centuries before that sen- 
sitive and noble prophet Jeremiah had written of the day 
when the law would be written in men’s hearts. Here 
you have the whole secret. As long as goodness is a com- 
pulsion from without, men will hate it. Whenever it is 
a devotion gladly rising from within, they will love it. 

And this finding of a new motive which transfigured 
an old morality, Paul achieved when he gave his utter 
allegiance to Jesus Christ. In Jesus the law was alive | 
and looking out of human eyes, reaching forth eager 
human hands and coming to men with all the wonder of 
the friendliness of a great heart. You can love a person. 
And so when the law became personal and full of com- 
passion, it won the heart of Paul. The great achievement 
of Jesus was to take law which had been a duty and trans- 
form it so that it became a devotion. He put a singing 
gladness at the heart of every “thou shalt’? which rang its 
clarion summons to the spirit of man. 

One dares to believe that it is the solution of Paul, the 
solution which he learned in a glad and creative experi- 
ence of the love of Christ, which this eager, masterful, 
restless age of ours most needs. It is not a deliverance 
from law for which we wait. That would disintegrate 
society and uproot civilisation. It is a deliverance within 
law. It is a transfiguration of law. Freedom and sta- 
bility, liberty and order, spontaneous initiative and obedi- 
ence meet together in the experience to which Paul gave 
such classic expression. He uprooted many things. He 
tore down many things. But society was safe in his hands 
because Jesus Christ had put the love of goodness in his 
heart. The world will be safe and the world will be free 
when we, too, find the secret of spontaneous and joyous 
and creative allegiance to that unselfish goodness which 
lived in the stainless splendour of the life of the Man of 
Galilee. And when we learn that the life of God is an 
eternal, creative and joyous goodness, then we have really 
discovered the secret of the harmony of a universe where 
all at last is law and yet all at last is love. 


LV 
THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS 


“T am the way.” John 14:6. 


“So many paths that wind and wind,” cried a discour- 
aged poet. And here you have one of the most baffling and 
bewildering aspects of the life of man. As long as the 
human spirit is heavy and sluggish and sodden, we feel 
that all would be well if it were only possible to rouse this 
sleeping giant. When there comes “to that untutored clod 
thoughts of destiny and God” then everything will be 
changed. The trumpet blast of the ideal is the hope of the 
world. And the belief that something in man will stir 
and rise and act in response to that summons is the very 
basis of all noble optimism about humanity. 

But when the trumpet blows it turns out to be a whole 
series of trumpets. When the ideal calls it turns out to be 
a series of ideals. And the trumpets call to causes which 
do not agree. And the ideals glow with enthusiasms 
which move toward inevitable conflict. The unity of life 
and purpose seems to be hopelessly lost in the confused 
contentions of conflicting ideals. Men’s very courage 
becomes their undoing as they fight in the dark. Their 
very capacity for noble self-giving becomes a tragic thing 
as they fight to the death in opposing armies, each cherish- 
ing an unconquerable hope, each following a dauntless 
ideal. One of the most urgent problems which confront 
our modern society thus comes to be the unifying or at 
least the harmonising of our ideals. Let us think together 
of some of the ideals which men have followed and of the 
solution of that great Master who said “I am the Way.” 

29 


30 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


1.—The Ideal of Possession. It would be a matter of 
very great interest were it possible for us to follow the 
trails of human life back to the first man who ever said 
“mine,” back to the feeling of personal possession which 
lay behind that little alluring word. The desire to own, 
the desire to possess, has entered most deeply into the very 
bone and fibre of mankind. And the hght which falls 
upon the thought of possession is the ideal which allures 
and summons many a life. ‘When I was a small boy,” 
said a wealthy man who was talking with curious frank- 
ness at a reunion of his college fraternity, “I saw a silver 
coin lying in the street. Another boy saw it at the same 
time. Each of us ran for it. I got there first. I have 
kept on seeing. I have kept on running. I have kept 
on getting there first.” Men are not often willing to 
talk of the acquisitive impulse with such bald and crude 
honesty. But here you have it in all its simplicity. And 
a good many people who use finer phrases to describe their 
attitude are after all deceived by it as completely as the 
man who put the case so bluntly. 

It is easy to see that a world of contending personalities 
driven by the unadulterated lust for acquisition can only 
bring sorrow and heartbreak and tragedy to the world. A 
man in such a world becomes cold and remorseless, a veri- 
table incarnation of selfishness. One has no desire to 
deny the legitimate place of the desire to possess in the 
organism of human life. But that desire alone has the 
secret of the wrecking of society in it. The man who 
accepts such an ideal becomes the sort of man “Whose 
faith unfaithful makes him falsely true.” He can only be 
true to it by being false to the deepest meaning of life. 

2.—The Ideal of Self-Expression. The more we study 
the psychology of the human species the more we become 
aware that the instinct for self-expression is a very funda- 
mental matter in personality. A thought is not fully ours 
until we have put it into words. We have not fully appre- 
hended a feeling until we have put it into action. That 
quality of our life by which we feel the necessity for 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS 31 


expression of all that is deepest and most characteristic 
of our individuality, is not something we choose, it is 
something which is structural in our natures. A man 
who did not desire for self-expression would not be a man. 
So it has inevitably come about that the struggle for ample 
self-expression has become the great ideal in many a life. 
And frequently that struggle has led to the most wonderful 
productiveness in the realms of art and literature, of music 
and poetry and painting. Great writing trails the secrets 
of a man’s soul in glorious speech. Great music pours 
out the deepest pain and passion and hope of the human 
spirit in deathless sounds. 

But this ideal of self-expression needs to be scrutinised 
with a good deal of honest analysis. There are a great 
many people in the world. And a few million of human 
units furiously seeking self-expression can easily produce 
an enormous amount of confusion and bitterness. In fact, 
the history of man is full of the wreckage lying in the 
wake of this impulse where it has gone madly. down the 
ways of life; unmastered and untutored and uninter- 
preted. We will discover, if we are persistent and honest 
in our thinking, that self-expression itself only comes to 
deep and abiding satisfaction when it is related to some- 
thing beyond the self. The man who exploits others for 
the sake of his own abounding personality, not only bru- 
tally wrongs them, but fails at last of personal satisfac- 
tion. The bitter restlessness of life which has known no 
principle but aggressive self-assertion tells its own very 
significant story. A generation which thinks only of 
self-assertion will in the dust and ashes of a disintegrated 
society discover that the self which is wisely asserted must 
somehow get other selves within the realm of its deepest 
thought. The man who said, ‘‘We become the most our- 
selves by being the most to others,’ did more than is 
indicated by the verbal swing of the epigram which he 
produced. He stated a principle which is fundamental 
to society. 

8.—The Ideal of Knowledge. The Grammarian in 


32 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


Browning’s notable poem decided “not to live’ but know.” 
And he is the type of a great number of keen and powerful 
personalities who have made the end of life the attaining 
of knowledge. The world without is endlessly whetting 
our curiosity. The world behind is perpetually rousing 
us to scholarly investigation. The world within is all the 
while alluring us to observation and study. The common- 
wealth of the men who know is one of the greatest of the 
fraternities of the world. And the ideal of knowledge as 
the goal of life has glowed like a summoning flame before 
the mind of many a scholar. One must feel the grandeur 
of such an ideal. The men who allow more visible rewards 
and more material achievements to pass beyond the scope 
of their thought and give their lives to the reading of the 
story of the universe as it is written in stars and rocks, 
in living things and in the human spirit, in the records 
of civilisation and in the deathless hope which emerges 
with new grandeur after every decadent age, are at work 
in a great and noble task. Whether the master of classifi- 
cation be Aristotle in the fourth century before Christ or 
Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century after Christ, 
the spectacle of a man coordinating the available human 
knowledge in a vast system, whose classified results are 
within the reach of contemporary men, is one to rouse the 
mind and to stir the imagination. And all those men of 
microscopic learning who confine themselves to the detailed 
examination of small bits of territory in particular fields 
that the material for generalisation may be ready for a 
later day deserve our warmest and heartiest praise. The 
ideal of scholarship proves that the soul is alive in the 
civilised life of man. But we must be frank in facing 
the fact that there are limitations to this ideal of the 
attainment of knowledge. The habit of the pursuit of 
knowledge as the great and mastering end of life tends 
to produce a type of mind which is strong in criticism 
and weak in action. It tends to produce a habit of thought 
which makes men cool spectators rather than dauntless 
participants in the struggle of existence. And again and 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS 33 


again it produces a sort of contented preoccupation with 
the details of knowledge in a part of some particular field 
which becomes incapable of the larger outlook and the 
more complete survey. Scholasticism did not come to an 
end with the completion of the middle ages. There is a 
scientific scholasticism which depletes the mental life of 
scholars in the white light of our own age. 

4.—The Ideal of Thought. There are men who feel 
by a quick instinct that an age is bound to end in futility 
which does not produce clear-eyed and commanding think- 
ers. They discover that men can know without being 
able to think. And they make thought the goal of their 
endeavour. It is a great thing that in the midst of the 
heat and roar and noisy efficiency of our age there are men 
who have made a quiet place for themselves in which they 
can approach the task of “‘seeing life steadily and of seeing 
it whole”; of subjecting all the manifold elements of our 
experience to the stern test of thought. None too many 
men in any age really mount to thinkers’ thrones. And 
those who make the endeavour deserve an encouragement 
far more eager than we have given to them. All about us 
are mistakes and tragedies which even a little thought 
would have avoided. The man who makes his ideal the 
capacity to think clearly and soundly and productively 
deserves well of his fellow men. It is a curious thing 
that our universities are full of men so busy in classifying 
the materials this rich and abounding age has brought 
within our scrutiny that they do not have time to think 
about them. The serene and steady and capable thinker 
dwelling where all the departments of investigation meet 
is a rara avis in contemporary centres of learning. 

It is clear, however, that the thinker, too, must look to 
his limitations. He is often tempted to do his work upon 
an insufficient basis of dependable investigation. And so 
there is produced the man who is brilliant but unreliable. 
And he is tempted to feel that the man who has thought 
his way through a problem has also lived his way through 
that problem. The great achievement of crossing the 


34 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


gulf between thought and life involves problems of which 
the thinker often possesses all too little understanding. 

5.—The Ideal of Action. Lord Charnwood’s sympa- 
thetic and notable book on Theodore Roosevelt has re- 
minded us once more what a great place the man of potent 
and skillful action can occupy in the life of his time. And 
it may be said that in a good many ways the man of action 
is the characteristic man of our day. Dr. Grenfell met 
Dwight L. Moody years after that shrewd and earnest 
Evangelist had made a profound impression upon him as 
a young man in London. When Moody had listened to 
the words of appreciation of the incentive given long ago 
he flashed out the question, ““And what have you been 
doing since?” The world now knows very well what 
Grenfell of Labrador had been doing since and continues 
to do until this day. The strength of deeds speaks to the. 
very heart of our time. And the man who makes action 
his ideal has caught much of the deepest feeling in con- 
temporary life and has turned it into the music of a 
summoning aspiration. 

The man of action, however, can easily be a menace 
to society. Everything depends upon the quality of. his 
acts. The men who feel that it does not matter very much 
what you do so that you do it vividly and brilliantly and 
successfully are likely to leave a trail of devastation behind 
them. There should be a man of thought dwelling in 
the brain of every man of action. And at last the thought 
of others should be called into service at every step of 
his powerful way. One wonders as one watches the enthu- 
siastic crowds moving through the tomb of Napoleon in 
Paris how many of them understand the difference between 
a man of action and a man whose actions really further 
the life of the world. 

6.—The Ideal of Power. The era behind us in Amer- 
ica produced a series of magnates in business whose story 
is likely to make astounding reading to the people who 
live in this land a few generations hence. And here 
industrial and commercial and economic action were made 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS 35 


the vehicle of the most extraordinary power. The bending 
of the forces of nature and production and organisation 
and transportation and salesmanship to the creation of 
great and overwhelming power, involved qualities of lead- 
ership of the most definite and notable character. And 
so in another fashion there was expressed the age-old 
ideal of the man of power. 

We can read the story in vastly different ages and in 
manifold relationships. From the modern captain of 
industry we can turn to Charlemagne or Alexander. All 
the while it is the same story at bottom, the story of the 
belief in power as the goal of life. The men of power 
have left an indelible impression upon the life of the 
world. We cannot read the tale of their living without 
kindled minds and quickened imagination. But here 
again there are important qualifications if we would really 
appraise the significance of this ideal. For power can 
be used to deplete life. And power can be used to increase 
life. There is a power which is like one of those malignant 
diseases which have swept over Europe. The Black Death 
was very powerful, but its power was a blighting, deadly 
thing. There have been men of power whose destructive 
frenzy has rivalled the Black Death. You must scrutinise 
the fashion in which power is obtained. And you must 
know the way in which it is used if you would estimate 
the meaning of the ideal of power for the life of man. 

7.—The Ideal of Fellowship. We seem to be moving 
in an entirely different world when we come upon those 
gracious and luminous personalities whose ideal of life has 
been the achieving of human fellowship. The man who 
is capable of being a friend is a high and notable person. 
The man who is capable of being a friend to all of whom 
he can think or feel, is a fine flower of the most under- 
standing aspiring and living. Saint Francis of Assisi 
was a sort of Prince of human fellowship. He possessed 
a genius for loving which gives him a place all his own 
among the children of men. 

Maarten Maartens in his story, ‘“God’s Fool,” tells of 


36 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


a blighted personality with no mental or human power at 
all, it seemed, except the power to love. And at last this 
unselfish fool seems to have caught a light divine about 
his person as he stands amidst the hard sordidness of men 
who were able to know but had not learned to love. 

Our hearts become mellow as we stand in the presence 
of men like Saint Francis. And even as we take off our 


sandals as we stand on that holy ground, we remember 


that love must be efficient if it is to do the greatest work 
in the world. We remember that fellowship must have 
a keen mind and a steady will behind it if it is really 
to make the greatest contribution to the life of the world. 
We catch a fleeting vision of a Plato, a Caesar and a 
Francis of Assisi made into one. 

8.—The Ideal of Service. Every age has its own great 


words. And one of the greatest words of this day of our > 


own is the word service. It is so often on our lips that 
one might fear it would be worn threadbare. But there 
is so much sincerity behind it, there is so much solid and 
capable effort in it, that this good and gracious word keeps 
its individuality and its power. The story of the life of 
a man like Jacob Riis in New York City is the tale of a 
keen mind and a resilient personality which caught the 
vision of human service as the great ideal of life. And 
out of his years of effort the desert of a city’s slums began 
to blossom as arose. The great cities and the lowly places 
of need about the world have felt once and again in our 
day the flashing of the light of this ideal of service. 
Reformers and philanthropists, missionaries and teachers, 


have poured the burning enthusiasms of a passion for. 


service into great tasks all about the world. Of course it 
did not begin with our time. But this ideal in a unique 
sense has come to its own in our day. 

We have yet much to learn about it. Your endeavour 
to serve may fail to upbuild the very personality and the 
society you desire to help if it is not wise and understand- 
ing. Service needs the trained mind to give it efficiency, 


Dag 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEALS 37 


and the loving heart to give it quickening power. It is 
another ideal which never comes to its best alone. 

These are only a few examples of the great ideals which 
have fought and struggled in the minds and hearts of 
men. How easy it is to be confused and baffled amidst 
their contentions. How easy it is to lose one’s way even 
with the trumpets blowing all about. 

And now we are ready for the great word of the Master. 
We are ready to see Him as on the tossing sea of the 
world’s ideals He says, “‘Peace, be still.” We are ready 
to listen to His words, “I am the Way.” 

9.—The Ideal of Jesus. When Jesus was about to 
depart from the world, Thomas voiced a lonely and wistful 
feeling which fell upon the hearts of the disciples as they 
listened to words of parting which they heard without 
more than half comprehending them. ‘The present was 
clouded with mist. The future was shrouded with gloom. 
They were in the darkness of a deep and sad ignorance. 
Then it was that Jesus spoke the words of glad reassur- 
ance, ‘J am the Way.” With Jesus alone ideal and reali- 
sation were one. And his life had the seal of eternity 
upon it. He expressed values which time cannot exhaust. 
And so he made immortality inevitable. That stainless 
unselfishness, that glowing winsome friendliness, that 
creative inspiration which characterised the whole per- 
sonality of Jesus constituted a living expression of the 
ideal which he brought to the world. He alone could say, 
“T am the Way.” 

With his ideal in command of a life, all other ideals fall 
into their rightful place. The desire for possession is 
completely saved from becoming a passion for exploitation. 
The ideal of self-expression is saturated with the generous 
spirit of feeling for others. The passion for knowledge 
is kept human and sympathetic. The ideal of thought is 
kept near to the demand for action. The ideal of action 
is controlled by the sense of justice. The ideal of power 
is made gentle and enriching. The ideals of fellowship 
and service are lifted to a new glory. The clue to the 


38 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


way through the labyrinth of ideals is found in the spirit 
of Jesus. He organised them into new potency, saving 
them from by-products of evil and welding them into an 
organism of good. The biographies of the men inspired 
by Jesus tell how each of them has caught something of 
the meaning of all this. The history of Christian living 
is the tale of a triumphant idealism becoming increasingly 
potent in the life of the world. “Before I die one glimpse, 
the way! the way!” cried a powerful young poet. The 
answer to every such cry is the one personality which 
touches the real with all the glory of the ideal and without 
strain or exaggeration and with entire simplicity can say, 
“T am the Way.” 


Vv 
THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 


“Tam... the truth.” John 14:6. 


All the while as you study the gospels you are seeing 
Jesus with the light falling upon his face in a new fashion. 
The exhaustless fertility of his personality is all the while 
expressing itself in new and varied relationships. The 
interview between Jesus and Pilate is one of the occasions 
when you have a new sense of the quality and the insight 
of the Master. 

On the one side is the able, powerful man of the world, 
the Roman governor with the genius for administration 
characteristic of his nation giving him the method of 
viewing all problems from the point of view which is 
related to practical expediency. Pilate is selfish and cruel, 
but he has certain broad views characteristic of the Roman 
mind. And he is not without an urbane sense of justice. 
There is a world weariness and cynicism about Pilate 
which do not escape the attention of the close observer. 
But he is a personage of power and leadership, and his life 
has been fed by all the richness of the Roman tradition. 

In contrast with this brilliant blasé Roman governor, 
Jesus is a simple man of the out of doors. The finish of 
the social centres of the world gives grace to the move- 
ments of Pilate. There is a regal quality about the bear- 
ing of Jesus which cannot escape the observer. But it 
is not the fineness of intriguing courts. It is a certain 
ample and gracious simplicity with a strange moral au- 
thority at its heart. Weary as He is after the events of 
the last night, Jesus makes the impression of being trium- 

39 


40 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


phantly and gloriously alive. It is as if perpetual youth 
gleams in His eyes. It is as if immortality shines in His 
face. There is sorrow and pain and deep and tragic woe 
in those eyes. But there is no cynicism. There is no hard 
disillusionment. And beneath all the sorrow there is a 
deep and ineffable peace. You have the feeling that Pilate 
with all his wide experience in the great world has never 
sounded the depths of life or the motives of men as has 
this peasant prophet who bears Himself like a king and 
who is so great that He never needs to think of Himself. 

Very soon the interview reveals the real qualities of 
the two men. Pilate for all his authority soon and inevi- 
tably takes the second place and Jesus talks to him with 
the kindly simplicity with which he might speak to a little 
child. It is as if He deeply pities this man who is so 
caught in the coils of the world’s indirection that it is 
very difficult for him to think with clear candour or to 
speak with noble ‘directness without hidden meanings 
lurking in the silences back of his speech. Jesus reassures 
Pilate, who is on the lookout for possible revolutionary 
movements, by telling him that His Kingdom is not a 
realm of contending soldiers and flashing swords. It is a 
Kingdom of the truth. Pilate is relieved but half con- 
temptuous. This then is not a leader of a dangerous 
movement but a harmless visionary. A Kingdom of the 
truth. Pilate toys with the idea. “What,” he asks in idle 
cynicism, ‘“‘What is truth?” On another occasion Jesus 
spoke the words we have used as a basis for our discussion, 
words which He might now have uttered in the presence 
of Pilate. “TI am the truth.” But Pilate could not have 
understood such words. And Jesus knew only too well 
the futility of uttering them as he stood in the presence 
of the proud Roman. So the two faced each other for a 
moment. The one represented a Kingdom of force. The 
other represented the Kingdom of truth. And it is of 
truth that we wish now to think. 

What a curious and evasive thing truth is! How long 
and difficult is the quest. How far and high is the goal! 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 41 


How men differ as to what truth is! How they differ as 
to the fashion in which it may be sought and found! 

Robert Browning’s great poem, “The Ring and the 
Book,” illustrates what I have in mind. The same sordid 
tale of a Roman murder is told again and again in this 
poem which is about as long as the New Testament. From 
a dozen different points of view the story is narrated. 
“Half Rome” sympathises with the husband. The wife 
was guilty and ought to have been killed. “The Other 
Half Rome” sympathises with the wife. The husband 
was a brute. The wife was an innocent victim. “Tertium 
quid,” a typical mind of microscopic appraisal, analyses 
the elements of the tale out of all relation to reality. He 
represents the tragedy of pure analysis. The lawyers 
represent dialectical skill rather than the seeking of truth. 
The characters speak in honesty or in brilliant attempt at 
self-defence. The Pope represents analytical power with 
a certain sense, for reality a certain deep and noble vision 
added. And as you read all these contradictory and dif- 
ferent interpretations once and again you feel dizzy and 
confused. These madly contending ideas fighting in the 
dark seem at certain stages of the poem to leave you quite 
helpless. The search for truth seems then an almost fruit- 
less adventure. 

Dean John H. Wigmore of the Law School of North- 
western University, whose work on Evidence has won an 
international reputation, has a dramatic way of bringing 
home to the minds of young law students the difficulty 
of getting at the truth even in ordinary matters. He 
stages a little scene before the class. It works out in some 
such fashion as this. Just as the class is about to settle 
down and listen to a lecture, the door opens. An excited 
man interrupts the speaker. He talks wildly. He refuses 
to be silent. He is finally put out. The class the while 
looks on with a good deal of excited astonishment. When 
the little scene is over each member of the class is asked 
to write down just what occurred. When this has been 
done the papers are collected. The next day Dean Wig- 


42 ‘HE IMPERIAL VOICE 


more reads aloud the most astonishingly contradictory 
accounts of what occurred. The man was tall. The 
man was short. The man was fat. The main was thin. 
He had a moustache. He was cleanly shaven. He struck 
the teachers. He did nothing but talk. He fell to the 
floor as he resisted those who attempted to remove him 
from the room. He went out fighting as he was pushed 
through the door. And all this represents the power of 
close observation on the part of a group of highly trained 
young college men who are entering upon a course in law. 

One cannot deny that from the realm of facts on to the 
remotest problems which have to do with the ultimate 
nature of reality itself the quest for truth is a terribly 
difficult and testing thing. 

But there has been such a quest. And there is such a 
quest. That alone would give a strange glory to the story 
of man’s adventure of living in this world. The aston- 
ishing thing is not that men found the quest for truth 
difficult. It is that they should ever have entered upon 
it at all. Centuries before Christ came the fight for truth 
became one of the great battles of the world. And though 
ideas have met in wild and terrible contention ever since, 
the very fact that such a conflict can arise puts humanity 
in a place of awful and august nobility. 

We are sometimes inclined to think that there is no 
disillusionment like the disillusionment of our age. We 
inflated our moral currency and the process of ethical 
liquidation is hard and difficult enough. And discouraged 
men and women are sometimes inclined to give up the 
quest for truth in a world where there are so many lies. 

If we find ourselves in such a mood it is well to go back 
to the fourth century before Christ in Athens and to wit- 
ness the career of a man who was born just a little too late. 
Plato had tremendous powers of mind and amazing quali- 
ties of personal leadership. But the process of decadence 
had gone so far in Greece that the opportunity for a great 
leader had passed before Plato came to the ripeness of 
mind and the fullness of power which made leadership 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 43 


on his part possible. There is scarcely a more unhappy 
or terrible experience than for a man of great powers to 
arrive in the world just a little too late to put those powers 
at the service of great and world-influencing activities. 
Plato lived in the Athens which killed Socrates. He lived 
in the Greece which had lost capacity for cohesive action. 
And what did Plato do? One can easily see how he could 
have sunk into misanthropy declaring that truth can never 
make a place for itself in this bitter and difficult world. 
One can see how he could have become a Hamlet before 
the days of Hamlet, hopelessly declaring that the times 
are out of joint, using a noble mind in ways which with 
all their brilliancy proved incapable and unproductive at 
last. What did Plato do? 

In a world which seemed at the time to have no place 
for the truth as he saw it, he stood steady and serene and 
undisturbed. He cast his ideas in great faith into the 
sky, crying, “There at least you are real. If not in this 
world, in the world above it. If not in time, in Eternity, 
truth is King.” And so he wrought out that philosophy 
of ideas which has given a new standing room to idealism 
in all the ages since. He believed that truth is structural 
in the universe even when he was confronted by falseness 
and deception and confusion in the world which he knew. 

Some other men of his time were all the while taking 
another attitude which indeed had been well defined in 
Athens the century before. The popular sophist was not 
a devotee of truth. He was a devotee of mental adroitness. 
He could make an equally good speech on any side of any 
subject. The contention of ideas was not a matter of 
principle with him. It was a matter of shrewd sharp 
practice. He treated ideas as pawns in the game. Every 
age has varieties of men who in different ways represent 
this type. To many a Roman governor truth was not 
an end in itself. It was a means to political ends. In a 
modern Democracy it is easy to develop the type of mind 
to which disagreeable truth seems an impertinence in 
the presence of practical political expediency. A truth 


44 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


which is not imperial ceases to be truth. And the men 
who play with reality complicate endlessly the always 
testing and demanding quest for truth. 

Now let us look at Jesus again as He stands in the 
presence of Pilate. The one represents a glorified expedi- 
ency. Pilate can send an innocent man to his death if it 
will solidify his rule. The other represents a dauntless 
loyalty. Jesus is ready to die for the truth. | 

But there is something even deeper than this. Jesus’ 
whole quest for truth was a matter of mighty moral adven- 
ture. He had no mathematical knowledge of whom He 
was or of what was His work in the world. He had no 
hard and rigid demonstration as to the nature of goodness 
and of God. His knowledge was the knowledge of faith. 
A great vision of the meaning of God, of the meaning of 
goodness, of the tremendous and eternal significance of 
His own personality, of the tragedy of evil, of the possi- 
bility of the rescue of men swept through His mind. He 
accepted it. He gave Himself to it. He risked everything 
in the name of it. And in the hour of absolute self-giving 
and loyal faithfulness He found certainty. 

His consciousness of His own relation to God was a 
moral and spiritual experience. It was perpetually being 
confirmed by an act of faith. It was realised in a life of 
faith. It was absolutely confirmed by a death of faith. 
It was as He risked everything upon His own flaming 
vision of His mission that all things became eternally 
clear. Truth to Him was something you find in the hour 
of courageous loyalty. It was something you find when 
you take risks. 

Pilate scorned moral risks. He would have regarded 
himself as too shrewd and practical a man to be caught 
in the coils of ethical sentiment. And in the very refusal 
he sealed his fate in a very practical and every-day sense 
as well as in a most far-reaching fashion. Life is so made 
that all certainty about the supreme things comes through 
personal venture. And the type of character developed in 
that fashion is just the sort which can be trusted with 


THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS 45 


the great tasks of life. The man who repudiates adven- 
turous moral loyalties sets processes of disintegration into 
action in his own life. Often the result is pitiable failure 
in the visible external matters of life. Always the result 
is an incapacity to appreciate the truth which is attained 
by means of moral experience. Jesus did not say “I am 
the truth” to Pilate, for such a sentence would have been 
meaningless to a man who had turned with final decision 
from life as an adventure in moral loyalty. Jesus did 
say “I am the truth” to a group of men who had forsaken 
all to follow him. They had made the great adventure. 
They were capable of understanding that there is a truth 
which comes to you in the hour of noble and self-forgetful 
action. 

Jesus believed that truth arises with its own sure au- 
thentication when in the hour of illumination we decide 
to risk everything in the name of the highest which we 
know. He was sure that day as He stood in the presence 
of Pilate because He looked far beyond the Roman govy- 
ernor. And straight across His own path He saw a cross. 
He was willing to risk even that. And so as He gave 
gave Himself to die, truth lived in Him. The mists 
vanish in the presence of a courage and a faith which is 
willing to put truth to such a test. 

The principle holds true of all human relations: of 
friendship, of the home, of the state, of the world. The 
truth is waiting for those who are willing to risk every- 
thing in the name of the highest conception of these rela- 
tions. Only in that glorious self-sacrifice which is a 
mother’s life does a woman know the meaning and the 
truth of motherhood. Without it she might bear children 
without ever being a true mother at all. And all the great 
integrities of life, its moral laws and its spiritual possi- 
bilities are revealed to the men and women who like daunt- 
less explorers are willing to set sail on the ships of their 
faith. The reality of religion, the assurance of fellowship 
with God, the glad expectation of immortality are moral 
experiences and become commanding and vital in the 


46 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


hours when we are willing to risk everything for them. 
As Donald Hankey said, “Religion is betting your life 
on the existence of God!” But it is more than that. For 
in the hour when we make the great venture hopes become 
certainties and faith is assurance. Certainty comes just 
when we put everything into the great enterprise. 

We can imagine another kind of certainty. We can 
think of another approach to truth. As the tide lifts all 
the boats we can imagine a certainty lifting all our minds 
from without. It might be very comfortable. But it 
would lack the greatest moral worth and the greatest 
spiritual meaning. The test every man can make is the 
dauntless loyalty to the noblest visions of good which 
come to him. And in that loyalty contending ideas find 
their way into unity and conflicting aspects of truth find 
gracious harmony. Even Jesus in Whose face we see 
the face of God found certainty in the loyalty of perpetual 
moral adventure. . And just that sort of certainty he 
desired for his disciples. ‘I am the truth” He could say, 
for He exemplified the only way by which torn and broken 
men could find their way to moral and spiritual certainty. 
They, too, were to make the adventure. They, too, were 
to know the truth. And the truth was to make them free. 

The most difficult age is then the greatest age. For it 
gives the best opportunity for the taking of noble risks, 
for the great moral adventures, for the assurance which 
comes in the hour when in spite of clouds and darkness 
men hold the rudder steady and sail for an invisible shore. 
When a man can say 


‘Sf my bark sink 
Tis to another sea” 


faith has already become knowledge, and it is the most 
productive sort of knowledge if Christ is with him in the 
bark. The fellowship with Jesus in a career of moral 
adventure is the supreme experience of life. 


VI 
THE CONFLICT OF EXPERIENCES 


“Tam... the Life.” John 14: 6. 


Many people are afraid of ideals. They consign them 
to the realm of delicate and evanescent poetry in order 
to escape their insistent demand. They feel that the 
idealist who takes his visions seriously is all the while 
climbing tortuous mountain trails with falls and bruises 
as his hourly portion and if he reaches the dizzy summit 
it is a lonely crag barren of warm life and interest, with 
wild abysses beneath into which it is all too easy to fall. 
They plead endless clever excuses whenever they hear the 
call to ideal heights. 

There are many people who are afraid of talk about 
truth. The very word sounds academic. The battle for 
scholastic distinction does not interest them. Argument 
easily becomes clever sophistry and they are ready to 
avoid it if they may. They are busy men, moving about 
the turbulent streets of our modern town. They are under 
the constant pressure of difficult and insistent demands. 
They have parted company with poetry. They have no 
time for abstractions. So they say and so they believe. 
They belong to a grim and practical brotherhood. To drop 
into their own vernacular, they are men of brass tacks. 
At the moment we will not concern ourselves with the 
easy fallacies of their thinking which make it easy for 
them to miss the meaning of the word of Jesus when 
with great ideals blazing before Him He declares “I am 
the way.” We will not concern ourselves with that near- 
sightedness of the mind which fails to feel the urgent 

47 


48. THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


power of his word, when speaking of ideas Jesus declares, 
“T am the truth.” But we will remind ourselves that 
there is a realm which even the most hard-headed and 
shrewdly practical man cannot avoid. He may turn from 
ideals and fly from general principles. But he cannot 
avoid the pressure of experiences. The world of events 
holds him in its grasp. The world of activity moves all 
about him. It picks him up and carries him on. The 
actions and the reactions of people and things play with 
vast momentum through his personality. He is a part 
of it all. He cannot escape experience. And so when 
Jesus says “J am... the life” he speaks in a language 
whose intimate significance for every individual cannot 
be denied. The adventure of living is the adventure which 
every one of us is making. 

Let us think together this morning of some of the types 
of life which characterise the human adventure. Let us 
see the fashion in which they meet and contend. And 
then let us try to see the relation of Jesus to it all. 

There is, first of all, that very characteristic product, 
the aggressive life. Very early in biological experience 
this type emerges. When living things first come out of 
the water to take possession of the land you have a re- 
sponse to this instinct of aggression. When an early 
man, shrinking with terror and yet drawn by curiosity 
and interest, sees the lightning play among the trees of a 
forest in a storm, sees dead branches on dead trees catch 
fire, and when one of them falls to the ground, moves 
toward it in fascinated and terrified daring, picks up the 
end of the branch which is not burning, triumphantly 
carries it about, holds it near to another bit of dry wood, 
discovers with an accession of delighted interest that the 
fire ignites that dry wood, and so works on to make fire 
his servant, you have a tremendously interesting illustra- 
tion of the aggressive mind in action. 

The aggressive man is one of the pivotal men of the 
world. He is the pioneer. He is the explorer. He is 
the bringer in of new days of hope and of opportunity. 


THE CONFLICT OF EXPERIENCES 49 


He is also a very dangerous man. For the man of aggres- 
sion easily becomes a tyrant. He bends men to his will. 
He crushes whatever stands in his way. He leaves trails 
of blood behind him. He is the hope and the terror of 
the world. And the point about all this for our discussion 
is just that these things have happened and are happening 
in the world. We are not thinking now of aggression as 
ideal but of aggression as practice. And we may say that 
all of us have felt and have responded to impulses of 
ageression. And all of us in one way or another have 
suffered from the tyranny of aggression. It is a structural 
part of the experience of life. 

Then there is the acquisitive life. Humanity is all 
the while finding that life is a series of episodes which 
connect themselves with possessive pronouns. The acquisi- 
tive life never gets beyond “mine.” It is a personally 
conducted declension which begins with “I,” goes on to 
“my” or “mine,” but never reaches “thine.” Here again 
we are not thinking of wide-eyed lads picturing conquests 
in the quickened fancy which so glows and blazes in 
youthful dreams. We are not thinking of the Count of 
Monte Cristo climbing to a height and with imagination 
hot with anticipation crying, ““The world is mine.” We 
are thinking of the acquisitive life in action. It would 
be wonderfully interesting to have a series of photographs 
of all the great misers of the world. If we could. pass 
them all in review, cataloguing their characteristics, and 
_ analysing their essential qualities, we would know what 
the acquisitive life does to a man. And the faces would 
not all be the faces of men of wealth. A man may live 
a completely acquisitive life although he never deals with 
very large sums. The grim light of possession may gleam 
in eyes which barter goodness and truth for a strangely 
small price. A man may have the touch which turns his 
heart to hard and glittering gold, although he never works 
that wonder in any other fashion. And the acquisitive 
life may make no end of things the reward of its struggle. 
The tale of it is told in every lonely countryside. It is 


50 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


repeated in every town. It swells to a great chorus in 
every city. 

But very soon we discover that the lives of powerful 
aggression belong to the few, and although all men are 
tempted to think too much of acquisition, the lives in 
whose experience the acquisitive motives are dominant 
are in a minority. In fact, speaking upon the largest 
plane of human experience, we may say that in many 
ways the lives of the majority of the people in the world 
have been controlled from without rather than from 
within. Sometimes circumstances master men. Some- 
times institutions master them. Sometimes other people 
master them. ‘There are multitudes of hard and sullen 
faces, there are multitudes of pale and patient faces, there 
are multitudes of listless and expressionless faces which 
tell the tale of lives buffeted and thrown down and mas- 
tered by forces outside themselves. Life seems very often 
to take an angry and resisting mortal, to thrust him into 
an ugly and bitter little corner and to say “stay there.” 
Sometimes the machinery of life crushes personality. Men 
get caught in the wheels. They are drawn by the belts. 
They have no life of their own. Experience grasps them 
in one hard hand and strikes them with the other and 
as it strikes they seem to hear a scornfully cruel voice 
which says, “Take that !—and that !—and that!” 

Men can simply give up all resistance under such pres- 
sure. They can cease to call their souls their own. They 
can lie down in listless acceptance of a bitter fate. And 
multitudes on multitudes of men do just that. 

On the other hand, they can become rebels. They can 
rise after every rebuff and go forth to battle. Like the 
warrior in the ballad they can le down and bleed a while 
and then rise up to fight again. Age after age the apostles 
of revolt come and go. One of the disciples of Jesus was 
a zealot, a member of the fraternity of rebellion in his 
day. Every century has its grim antagonists standing on 
the edges of life and shaking their fists at the universe. 

There is a third way to deal with this problem in 


THE CONFLICT OF EXPERIENCES 51 


experience of the life controlled from without. This is 
the way of the acceptance of limitations without being 
quelled by them or without having our personality crushed. 
A man can accept life with a calm and quiet strength, 
which maintains a certain quality of independence even 
in the years of adjustment to difficult and hard-pressing 
circumstance. Arthur Benson in one of his volumes 
of essays tells a story of an old nurse of gracious and 
noble personality who actually made a great career out 
of a position of relative servitude. She was simply and 
obviously superior to the circumstances of which she was 
a part. She accepted them. She used them. She built a 
noble life out of them. 

Our contemporary life is full of the restlessness of the 
great refusal to accept the limitations of circumstances 
and all the elements of control enforced from without. 
As one studies the middle ages, with all their obvious back- 
wardness, but with so much of quiet charm, so much of 
joy in life and then thinks of the nerve-torn restlessness 
of the world today, it is inevitable that many long, long 
thoughts should be suggested to the brooding mind. 

There is, of course, in the world of experience all about 
us, such a thing as productive activity. And the lives of 
productive activity are singularly happy. It is all the 
opposite of the mood which is all the while taking things 
to pieces. When I was a small boy I found a singular 
happiness in getting hold of an old clock and taking it 
apart. Once and again I unfastened the wheels and took 
them out of their places. But I never succeeded in putting 
a clock together again. There is an interest which belongs 
to the experience of destruction. But it brings no perma- 
nent satisfaction. 

On the other hand productive activity enriches the 
world. The inventor and the artist give to mankind some- 
thing which was not possessed before. The builder of a 
bridge, the men who construct a railroad, or a ship, who 
paint pictures and write noble poems, the men who think 
out the essential elements of complex situations and write 


52 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


books of bright and keen insight, these men have a kind 
of zest in achievement which is a part of the gladness of 
human experience. The activity of spontaneous happi- 
ness is one of the supreme achievements open to human 
kind. The observation of such a life gives a man a new 
confidence as to the significance and the future of human 
life. 

These are only a few of the types of human experience 
which emerge as we survey the foaming sea of rational 
existence on this planet. The aggressive life, and the 
acquisitive life, the life of slavery, the life of revolt, the 
life of accepted and transcended limitations, the life of 
destructive energies, the life of productive and creative 
activity, how they meet and do battle upon the arena of 
the world! 

The life of man seems like a vast maelstrom of con- 
tending experiences, and as we look at the rush and roar 
and intensity of it all, we may be pardoned if we stand 
on the brink with hesitation and anxiety and even with 
alarm. Bulwer Lytton once wrote a story of a man who 
went through certain years of his life with the sense that 
he was a spectator of human experience and not a partici- 
pant in its vicissitudes. ‘There are moments and there 
are moods when most men feel that they would choose 
that. But the moments pass. The moods go. They do 
not represent us at our best. And in any event sooner 
or later the currents of life draw us into the place where 
the experiences of life meet in tempestuous conflict. 

It is in this torn, troubled and turbulent existence that 
we find Jesus Christ, so quiet, so calm, and so strong. 
And over the noise of the roaring waters we hear Him 
say ‘“‘I am the life.” It is a tremendous assertion. And 
as we look upon Him so unspeakably steady and firm and 
sure and yet so vividly alive, we feel that He had a right 
to make it. And we begin to ask ourselves if we can 
apprehend the elements of that sure and untroubled yet 
vital serenity which characterised His manhood. There 


THE CONFLICT OF EXPERIENCES 53 


are at least a few things which stand out clearly when 
we begin to make the analysis. 

It is definitely seen first of all that nothing outside 
His own personality could disturb him. Here I stand 
today fairly happy and comfortable. But one word in 
a telegram might plunge me into abject misery and crush 
me to the earth. As you look at Jesus you know that 
nothing can disturb His calm and steady spirit. There 
were fires in His heart which would burn up any bitter- 
ness which could enter from without. He found satisfac- 
tion not in the things which the life about gives and takes 
away. And so He was not subject to the vicissitudes 
which come with all the changes of this bewildering 
world. He made every unfriendly event an ally of His 
deepest life by bending it to some moral and spiritual 
purpose. It was not that He was indifferent to things 
and people. It was just that this dominant inner life 
found a way to use every experience for the purposes of 
that triumphant goodness which was the essence of His 
life. 

Then, and in a sense growing out of this, there is a 
contrast which comes to us very quickly as we go on think- 
ing of our lives and comparing them with His. We are 
all the while conscious that we are expressing only a part 
of ourselves in our words and in our deeds. There is 
something tragically fragmentary and incomplete about 
our lives. We are not able even to keep in consciousness 
_ all that we mean or all that we are. If we replied hon- 
estly when the roll is called sometimes we would reply 
“one-half present,’ sometimes we would say “one-third 
present,” and I am afraid that sometimes we would have 
to say “one-tenth present.” But Jesus was all the while ° 
completely present. He brought His whole personality 
to every experience. All that He was lived in each aspect 
of His life. The fragmentary was transcended in the 
complete. 

He found His path through the world by organising all 
of His life about a great moral love. His love of right- 


54 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


eousness kept Him from being unjust. His love of hu- 
manity kept Him from being unkind. But such sentences 
only hint at the fashion in which all ethical insight and 
noble feeling live in His inner life and come forth in 
the stainless beauty of perfect deeds. 

He lived in poverty. Yet He was never poor. His 
riches of personality made incidental His poverty in 
things. And He had much to say about riches, always 
seeing in wealth something which must be completely 
controlled and mastered by moral and spiritual purpose. 
He had a deep pity for the man who became the slave of 
his own possessions. He faced more limitations than we. 
He went through life deliberately refusing to use for 
Himself any power not within the reach of other men. 
And He deliberately shut out of His life things which 
came within the area of the right and usual experiences 
of men. Though His teachings contain the seed of many 
a revolution, He was too great for revolt. He knew that 
the spectacle of a life triumphant in spite of adverse cir- 
cumstances was an even more fundamental necessity for 
humanity than the offer of leadership in the battle for 
reform. So often the struggler for reform has an evil 
in his own heart as tragic as that against which he is 
fighting. Christians inevitably do battle with ancient 
and entrenched evil. But their Master is all the while 
inspiring a type of character in which reformation is 
transcended in the moral and spiritual splendours of the 
new order and even the old order is unable to prevent 
the gracious flowers and the noble fruitage of moral and 
spiritual victory in the life of man. 

You get a sudden hint of what He did for men when 
you see Paul in chains before the sumptuous King 
Agrippa. At first as you look at the surface of the picture 
you say, “‘I pity this prisoner.” Then as you look more 
deeply you say, “I pity this king,” for you sense the 
presence of a quality in personal and spiritual life which 
has time and eternity on its side. 

Where Jesus accepted limitations, He transcended 


THE CONFLICT OF EXPERIENCES 55 


them. Where He lived patiently with malignant evil 
about, He set going forces before which evil would fall. 
And all the while He and the men who learned His secret 
faced life gladly, because aggression and acquisitiveness, 
submission and creative activity, the forces of life and 
the soul, were bent to complete allegiance to a principle 
of moral discrimination which was the very basis of a life 
of inner harmony and outer strength and beauty. He 
had the right to say, ‘‘l am the lite.” And he had the 
right to say, “I came that they may have life and have it 
abundantly.” 


VII 
THE CONFLICT OF SALVATIONS 


“No one cometh unto the Father, but by me.” John 14: 6. 


The sense of failure has settled heavily upon the world. 
Underneath all the differences of race and colour and creed 
there is this bitter and tragic sense of ideals unrealised, 
of hopes which have never come to fulfillment, of folly 
and futility, of dolorous incapacity to achieve a full and 
complete and satisfactory life. Once in a while a bright 
and brittle creed of success fills the mind of a people, and 
men shout their phrases of superficial optimism with a 
determined indifference to disagreeable facts. But the 
deeper and more serious spirits of every land confront 
the spectacle of human folly and failure with brooding 
and honest sadness. There is the world-wide sense of a 
need of rescue. We are caught in a terribly ethical and 
spiritual debacle. And we do not know what to do as 
we face its hard and cruel tragedy. 

To be sure, thoughtful and earnest spirits of many lands 
have faced the problem. Many attempts have been made 
to understand and to analyse its elements. Let us study 
some of these revealing and often pathetic and always 
valuable endeavours. And after we have examined the 
contending conceptions of human need and the conflicting 
conceptions of salvation, let us approach the word of 
Jesus and see what light it throws upon the whole difficult 
and disconcerting problem. 

A very old analysis found in those Far-Eastern lands 
which early witnessed the coming of men who thought 
sadly and deeply about human life declared that existence 

56 


THE CONFLICT OF SALVATIONS 57 


itself is the fundamental evil and that salvation must 
consist in being rescued from existence itself. ‘“Isn’t life 
rotten!” exclaims a disillusioned character in a contem- 
porary drama. And there have been men returning from 
the Great War, young cynics in the midst of the torn and 
broken world, who have spoken as if they have discovered 
that there is only a worm at the heart of the apple of life. 
We have only to bite through to find it. The ugly truth 
is, they say, that life itself has no soundness. Life itself 
is not a healthful process of growth. It is a disgusting 
process of decay. So they say. Centuries before the birth 
of Christ that thought possessed the minds of men in the 
Far East who had weighed life in the balances and had 
found it wanting. Existence itself they felt was a bad 
and intolerable burden. And the salvation which they 
sought was deliverance from existence. They would not 
have said with the Prince Hamlet whom Shakespeare 
created so many centuries after their time, “To be or not 
to be; that is the question.” They would have said, “To 
be is a tragedy and how to escape being; that is the ques- 
tion.” They did not seek immortality. They feared it. 
And the one who could assure them of mortality, of the 
end of life’s fitful dream would be to them a Saviour 
indeed. 

Another attitude toward the problem saw the basis of 
the evil plight of man not in existence but in conscious- 
ness. Buddhism came to the feeling that the very aware- 
ness of self which is basal in all consciousness has such 
roots of egotism in it that it is essentially evil. The mo- 
ment you say “I am I and thou art thou,” poison has 
entered into life. Accord to this view, it would not be a 
tragic thing to be a star. But the moment a star became 
conscious of itself, the moment it knew that it was a star, 
then black and devastating evil would have entered into 
its experience. The consciousness of self leads to egotism. 
In fact, it is founded on egotism. The consciousness of 
other things leads to desire and desire leads to covetousness 
and theft. The consciousness of others leads to jealousy 


58 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


and to exploitation. Everything evil leads back to con- 
sciousness at last. Where there is no consciousness, there 
is no evil. Where there is no consciousness, there is no 
sin. Where there is no consciousness, there is no guilt. 
Therefore, it is from consciousness that we must be deliv- 
ered. Salvation from consciousness is the ultimate safety 
of the soul. 

The student of the early period of the life of Saint 
Augustine will remember that for a number of years he 
was most deeply interested in a view of life which taught 
that matter is essentially evil. As long ago as the old 
Persian dualism, the battle between the good and the evil 
was regarded as the fundamental conflict of existence. 
And when once men began to think in the terms of this 
sharp cleavage and began to have such conceptions as 
that of mind and matter, of spirit and body, it was very 
easy to think of the physical as the essentially evil and of 
the spiritual as the essentially good. The fact that the 
body may be made the servant of dark and evil vices 
lent itself to this conception. The reader of Kingsley’s 
“Hypatia” will remember the young Philemon’s first sight 
of pictures of beautiful women, his feeling of fascina- 
tion as he viewed their lovely faces, and the dark and 
bitter feeling that they were part of the evil of the world. 
Men in all ages have fought terrible battles with the body, 
and under the stress of the struggle it has been easy to 
feel that the whole physical order is a blighting evil thing. 
The material has often seemed the foe of the spiritual. 
The body has often seemed the foe of the mind. 

One may remark in passing that this view is forced 
to pass by rather lightly those evil attitudes which are 
essentially a mental and spiritual thing. And one may 
say, too, that it hardly faces the extent to which the body 
is after all only a beast of burden for the mind. The sins 
of the body are mental acts which the body is forced to 
further. Perhaps if we thought clearly we should regard 
the body as the victim rather than the culprit. In any 
event the heavy burden of physical experience and all 


THE CONFLICT OF SALVATIONS 59 


the ways in which the material may be made the servant 
of the evil have led many men to decide that matter is 
the ultimate principle of the wrong of the world, that 
the physical and the sinful are one. Salvation, then, is 
deliverance from the body. It is a process of rescue from 
the physical. To be delivered from matter is to be saved 
from sin. 

The bright young Athenians who listened to the stirring 
and enticing speech of Socrates found that he had a very 
definite view of the nature of evil. The last stronghold 
of the darkness and its ultimate defence were to be found 
just in ignorance. It was not conceivable to the crystal 
mind of Socrates that a man would deliberately choose a 
wrong thing which he knew to be wrong. The power of 
evil lay essentially in ignorance of its true character. 
Whenever you knew the whole quality and history of an 
evil thing you could not love it. The very moment you 
perceived its true nature, you hated it. The tragedy of 
the world is its ignorance. The evil of the world is its 
lack of knowledge, Therefore, what men need is deliver- 
ance from ignorance. Therefore, salvation is knowledge. 
To know the good is to love it, even as to know the evil 
is to hate it. The man who rescues the world from its 
ignorance is its Saviour. 

With all the fascination of this view and with all the 
obvious elements of truth which it contains, we may 
remark, as we move quickly along, that a study of the 
volitional processes of man will throw light upon aspects 
of the problem which did not come within the area of the 
thought of Socrates. There is an evil which can be cured 
by knowledge. ‘There is an evil which knowledge does 
not affect. Deliberate wrong doing presents a problem 
which has far-reaching roots never understood by the most 
engaging and versatile of the men who talked of great 
matters upon the streets of Athens. 

When a man studies the intricate organisations of mod- 
ern society and all the fashion in which individuals are 
caught and crushed in the machinery of life, he begins to 


60 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


see that the very organisation of the world of men may 
become the foe of our highest life. It is only a step from 
this thought to the view that the organisation of the mod- 
ern world with its vast entanglements of unscrupulous 
and lawless elements is the enemy of that goodness which 
is the goal of life. The present order, we are told, makes 
morality impossible, destroys spirituality and disinte- 
grates the bodily life of man. It is the living embodiment 
of the forces of destruction. It is the present organisation 
of society which is the expression of the spirit of sin. It 
is from society that man must be delivered. Salvation 
consists in the overthrow of the present social order and 
the setting up of another in its place. 

In the midst of the very situation which leads to such 
a view other thinkers go once more to the centre of the 
individual personal life. They are impatient with that 
repentance of the sins of others and the ignoring of one’s 
own sins which is so easy to the man who condemns this 
order in which he lives without critically inspecting his 
own life. They do not deny social evil. They see the 
necessity for social reform and even for social reconstruc- 
tion. But at the very basis of all the evil they see a flaw 
in the individual personal attitude. There is something 
in a man which causes him to face goodness and come 
to face God with the bitter challenge, “Not thy will but 
mine be done.” No new social organisation would produce 
a good world if this tendency of the human heart remained 
unmastered. As long as individual men and women put 
personal selfish desires above brotherhood and goodness 
there can be no better world order which will really satisfy 
the needs of man. Selfishness is the canker worm at the 
heart of life. It is selfishness which must be cast from 
our hearts. Salvation is deliverance from selfishness. 

Now we come to the great word of Jesus and we ask, 
“What did salvation mean to him? How did He view 
the problem?” It is very clear that He believed that any 
life in fellowship with the living God of righteous love is 
a safe and growing life. It is free from the danger of 


THE CONFLICT OF SALVATIONS 61 


disintegration. It is relieved from all dark and evil 
things. Salvation to Jesus was fellowship with God. Life 
without that fellowship is powerless and without hope. 
And Jesus felt Himself to be the means of entrance into 
that fellowship. When He said, “No man cometh to the 
Father but by me,” he expressed both His sense of what 
salvation is and of the method by which it can be obtained. 

That fellowship in which Jesus conceived salvation to 
consist throws light upon all the other conceptions which 
we have been considering. Truly, existence without that 
fellowship for an immortal spirit would be so barren and 
terrible a thing that man does indeed need to be delivered 
from it. But that deliverance comes not by annihilation, 
but by such a friendship with God that existence becomes 
a joy and not a woe. Self-consciousness is so terrible and 
egotistic a thing that man does indeed need to be delivered 
from it. But not by the end of all consciousness. Rather 
by a new kind of consciousness. The consciousness of the 
presence and friendliness of the living God delivers a man 
from all the evils the Buddhist feared and opens the doors 
of a gladness which he has never understood. The body 
and the physical world are a menace if they are ends in 
themselves, but they are sacramental if they are made the 
means by which men express their loyalty to God and their 
fellowship with Him. “Still, still with Thee when purple 
morning breaketh” suggests a relation to nature suffused 
by the sense of the glory of God. The thought of the body 
as the temple of the Holy Ghost suggests a fashion in 
which the physical may become the vehicle of the eternal. 
No understanding Englishman since Wordsworth has 
needed to be taught that nature may be the friend and 
not the foe of the spirit. Fellowship with God is that 
knowledge which saves from ignorance. It is that unself- 
ish love which makes society the organ of unselfishness 
and not the means of exploitation. It is that spontaneous 
devotion to God which leads to a love for all his children 
and so strikes a death blow to selfishness in the human 
heart. Fellowship with God is salvation. 


62 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


And how does Jesus make this possible? How was He 
able to say, ““No man cometh to the Father but by me.” 
First of all, He makes God real. “Show us the Father 
and it sufficeth us.” ‘“That,” in effect, replied Jesus, ‘‘is 
just what I have been doing, just what I am doing. He 
that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”” The moment 
we begin to believe in a Christ-like God, everything is 
changed. And Jesus makes God authentic. As we see 
the love in His eyes, as we see the goodness in His actions, 
as we witness the perfect insight of His speech and it 
dawns upon us that in all this God is speaking to us, there 
comes a deep sense of ethical satisfaction. This is the 
God than Whom there could be no better. The very 
reach of the imagination is transcended in what Jesus 
is and does. The eternal sense of the fitness of things is 
satisfied. We feel no incongruity as we look upon Him 
and say, ‘“Here God speaks to me.” 

Then Jesus makes God compelling. As we see His ten- 
derness and pain and self-forgetful love and realise that 
God’s own heart is breaking with the tender and sacrificing 
love which we see in Jesus, we are ready to open our 
hearts to the Great Master of Life as we could never do 
before. The love that will not let us go is more than the 
love of a good man. In Jesus we touch this love of God 
Himself. And its compulsion completely masters our 
hearts. 

He makes it possible for God’s motives to become our 
motives. Now at last God’s word has been fully spoken 
in the world. God’s life has been fully lived in the world. 
And as we accept the purposes of Jesus, God’s own pur- 
poses come to dwell in our hearts. 

Then Jesus deals with the great final moral and spir- 
itual relationship in such a way as to make fellowship 
with God possible. As we watch Him in Gethsemane and 
on Calvary, we come to know that all that God is of 
righteousness and love, of goodness and compassion are 
so expressed in living deed within human life that now 


THE CONFLICT OF SALVATIONS 63 


at last man and God may meet. God and man are joined 
in fellowship in the broken heart of Christ. 

He reveals the triumph upon which a creative fellow- 
ship must be based. The victory over death is a great 
achievement. It is also a great symbol. The fellowship 
with God in Christ is an eternally victorious fellowship. 

And He Himself inaugurates and develops this creative 
friendship which transforms and renews the life of man. 
Surely he could say with simple spiritual authenticity, 
“No one cometh unto the Father but by me!” 

So we stand once more in the presence of Jesus Christ. 
The reconciler of ideals; the way; the lord of reality; 
the truth; the master and interpreter of experience; the 
life; the one who brings to us the secret of fellowship with 
God; no one cometh into that full fellowship but by Him. 
In this torn and troubled age, we hear his words, ‘Behold, 
I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice 
and open the door, I will come in and sup with him and 
he with me.” We have heard His voice. We have heard 
Him knock. We will open the door. And in Him we 
will find that eternal fellowship in which man meets and 
receives as His friend the living God. Amen. 


VIII 
THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND 


“To the young man knowledge and discretion; ; 
That the wise man may hear and increase in learning.” 
Proverbs 1: 4, 5. 


The history of education is in a sense the history of 
knowledge. The men of every land who have pursued 
the intellectual life have felt a debt to all those who could 
be benefited by their labours. Even as that praise of 
wisdom in the Old Testament of which we have just 
quoted an example is full of the joy of imparting this 
wisdom to those who stand at the threshold of the great 
adventure of living so the men of every period of clear 
thinking and creative experiment have worked with a 
happy sense of those who would profit by their labours. 
The university, whether in Alexandria or in Athens or 
in Paris or Oxford, is the organic expression of this desire 
to hand on the full results of the best thinking and the 
deepest experience of the past. 

Of course you can never confine the process within 
university walls. Every nation and every civilisation is 
all the while in process of making its own mind and while 
the conscious effort of educators has a profound influence 
upon the movement it extends to areas as wide as the 
experience of the whole people, and it incorporates many 
a result not the product of a scholar’s research and many 
a conclusion not first worked out in some doctor’s thesis. 
This intellectual élan vital is of the profoundest signif- 
cance. It may work itself out in such epigrammatic 
sayings as those to be found in the Book of Proverbs. It 
may come to full expression at last in the stately and 

64 


THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND 65 


ordered work of some commanding philosopher. It may 
remain in solution in the common mind perpetually influ- 
ential and yet unorganised and almost subconscious. The 
university does its best work as the servant of the state 
and of the common good when it enables those who are 
trained within its walls to understand this perpetual move- 
ment of the public mind. 

It will be a matter of much significance for us, if our 
investigation is at all successful, to follow for a little this 
afternoon some of the elements which have entered into 
the making of the mind of America in as far as that mind 
may be said to have come to organic life; and those ele- 
ments which are proving influential in so far as our 
national mind is yet in the making. In such an investiga- 
tion we are dealing at once with the material which comes 
to the hand of the trained college man as he enters upon 
the actual practice of the art of living and working in this 
Republic. 

1.—Nobody denies that the Puritan has had a profound 
influence upon the mind of America. It is the fashion 
just now to look upon him with lofty scorn. Those daring 
young intellectuals who are so busy just now vicariously 
repenting of everything about American life which they 
dislike are never more nobly penitent than when they 
speak of Puritanism and all its works. Now none of us 
need deny that Puritanism did produce at times characters 
more rigidly strong than warmly human. And there were 
undoubtedly Puritans who were afraid of beauty as if 
it was a polluting thing. But after all we have no reason 
to be sorry that strength such as dwelt in the sinews of 
the Puritans entered into the very fibre of our national 
life. The New England conscience is not all there is of 
America, but it has put its stamp upon some of the very 
finest things in American life. And lovely vines have 
grown over its stern walls. A nation is not ethically poor 
which was fortunate enough to have the ten commandments 
set to martial music as a marching song at the very begin- 
ning of its life. 


66 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


2.—But the very nation which gave a home to the 
Puritan was also the home of the Cavalier. And what- 
ever some Puritans lacked in grace and charm and lovely 
amenity was amply made up in the gracious life which 
was set up on the banks of the James. When the stern 
days of the Revolution came, men of the Puritan breed 
and men of Cavalier ancestry fought side by side. They 
learned to respect each other. And they learned to appre- 
ciate each other’s qualities. It was that fine gentleman 
of the Cavalier tradition, George Washington, who gave 
so much of the tone to the early life of the Republic, as 
well as military and political leadership, in the days when 
the colonies were becoming a nation and the days when 
the new government was learning to walk. 

3.—The Roman Catholic tradition expressed with a 
certain easy urbanity which the Calverts brought with 
them to Maryland entered deeply into the very structure 
of the nation. The church which always thought in the 
terms of solidarity made its own contribution to the life 
of a nation which must learn the meaning of obedience 
as well as freedom, and the men who loved that dream 
of unity which had come to such marvellous expression 
in the thirteenth century, learned to live with men of the 
sturdy and independent Puritan tradition in such fashion 
that the ideals of both entered into the structure of the 
national life. 

4.—The sceptic is a ubiquitous sort of person. You are 
likely to hear him asking disagreeable questions whenever 
and wherever the mind of man is really awake. Ethan 
Allen, who represented the type in the Green Mountains 

of New Hampshire, and Tom Paine, whose love of liberty 
' was only equalled by his hatred of religious authority, 
are but two examples of a type frequent enough in the 
days when France was approaching and experiencing an 
intellectual as well as a political revolution. Particular 
men who took this trail were sometimes persons far enough 
from the ideal pattern. But the mood of shrewd sceptical 


THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND 67 


mental activity contributed elements of rugged strength 
to the national life. 

5.—On the other hand, the abounding faith and the 
splendid moral and spiritual enthusiasm of the evangelical 
spread throughout the land. Francis Asbury and all the 
apostles of the saddle-bags, from the scholar who read his 
Greek Testament by the light of the settler’s torch to the 
rough and untutored man who only knew the glory of a 
rapturous sense of the glad presence of a friendly and 
forgiving God, spread a fine contagion of hearty religious 
living from the north to the south and over the Allegheny 
Mountains into the New West. The sceptics and the 
men of the saddle-bags did not exactly regard each other 
as friends. As a matter of fact, however, each was con- 
tributing to that national mind which was to feel the glow 
of deep religious enthusiasms and the cutting edge of 
the most searching mental enquiry. 

6.—There is a sense in which the fundamental man in 
every land is the farmer. He is the ultimate producer. 
He stands at the very source of civilised living. The farm 
itself is, after its own fashion, a school of training. Na- 
ture has its own syllogisms and the seasons have their own 
mathematics. The men who tilled the soil often reflected 
the qualities of the parts of the country where they lived. 
The New England farmer had his own qualities. The 
farmer of the Middle West followed the habits of his own 
type. But there were great likenesses under all the differ- 
ences. And the man of agriculture has had his own share 
in making the mind of our nation. Men at mahogany 
desks in great cities find their ways of thinking and their 
ways of acting partly determined by the farmer’s blood 
which flows in their veins. There is an independence, a 
stalwart conservatism, and a solid strength which have 
been poured into the mental life of our nation from its 
men of agriculture. 

7.—Very early we became a nation with many trades- 
men. And the mind of the merchant sometimes seems 
to have become the mind of America. There is an agile 


68 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


and versatile quality about the man of trade. He is apt 
to lack something of the solid strength of the farmer. He 
is tempted to think more in the terms of expediency and 
less in the terms of character. He develops a sagacity 
with its own technique and he scents a bargain from afar. 
Whether he keeps a corner country store or thinks in the 
terms of the markets of the world he has his eye upon 
the practical relations of men, their likes and dislikes, 
their wants and their pleasures. Sometimes he reduces 
politics and law and religion and art and literature all to 
forms of the commercial enterprise. He has had a share 
in the making of all of us. And he has contributed some 
of its characteristic elements to the American mind. 

8.—There are politicians in every land where the people 
have the franchise. And America has had its own abun- 
dant harvest in this field. In the old days so full of 
glamour the South produced its own wonderful politicians 
and orators. The Middle West has made its own type. 
And it is probable that no more shrewd and skillful ob- 
server of the popular mind and no more skillful manipu- 
lator of the popular will has been developed in America 
than our Middle Western product. At his best the poli- . 
tician is a statesman with the welfare of the nation at 
his heart. With all his shrewd knowledge of his craft 
he loves his country deeply and he is ready to make 
sacrifices for its walfare. ‘The country which produced 
Abraham Lincoln has shown something of the best of 
which Democracy is capable. At his worst the politician 
is a wily time server putting party loyalty above the 
public good and shamelessly trading upon the most sacred 
sanctions of the civic life. Both at his best and at his 
worst he has existed in America and he has helped to 
make the fabric of the public mind. 

9.—From the very beginning there was scientific inter- 
est in America. In practical invention the tale moves from 
Benjamin Franklin to Orville Wright, from the capture 
of the lightning to the conquest of the air. It has become 
so deeply imbedded in all the more technical habits of 


THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND 69 


life in our universities that we may almost say that the 
scientific mind is the typical mind produced in our schools. 
It seems a far call from the politician to the expert engi- 
neer. But each has played his own part in the making of 
the mind of the Republic. There is a sobriety, a candour, 
and an honesty which have entered deeply into our best 
men from all the story of invention, of engineering ac- 
tivity, and of that experiment and research which form 
the basis of scientific work in our schools. 

10.—As life becomes more complicated and the proc- 
esses of labor more involved the organiser takes his place 
among us. In many relationships he is becoming our 
typical man. He is at the heart of every industry. He 
is at the centre of every enterprise. He knows how to 
train men to work together. He creates that vast articu- 
lation of human effort upon which all of our vast enter- 
prises depend. Whether he is directing the work of a 
factory or developing a corporation or conducting a politi- 
cal campaign he is always found where notable things 
are being done in a skillful way. He, too, has changed 
the quality and the methods of our national mind. 

11.—Ever since the beginning of the machine age at 
the end of the eighteenth century the machine worker has 
been pouring his qualities into the national mind as fast 
as the processes of machinery have taken their place in 
the life of the Republic. First, the skilled machine worker 
produced a well-defined type. We are now, as Mr. Arthur 
Pound has pointed out in that highly significant book, 
“The Iron Man,” living in the era of the automatic ma- 
chine and the unskilled machine worker. The under- 
developed mentally are being given such an opportunity 
to prosper and to increase as they have never known before. 
The whole situation bristles with difficult problems. It 
is clear that the automatic worker must learn how to use 
his leisure in intellectually productive fashion if he is not 
to deplete the vitality of the nation in mental stamina. 
And it is clear that his contribution is to have very pro- 
found influence upon the national mind. 


70 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


12.—The publicity expert is one of our most charac- 
teristic products. He knows how to attract public atten- 
tion. He knows how to hold public interest. He is 
tempted to think more of the arts of publicity than of 
the honesty of his methods. And so sometimes he de- 
bauches the public mind at the moment when he is sup- 
posed to illuminate it. The public, however, is shrewd, 
and by its scepticism is likely to prevent the publicity 
expert of the less conscientious type from becoming so 
great a menace as his own habits of mind might lead him 
to be. The sense of the world as a mirror and the valua- 
tion of everything from the standpoint of its possible 
publicity has, however, entered very deeply into our 
thought. When the publicity expert is a servant of truth 
he is an asset to the nation. 

13.—AlII the while we are producing a larger and larger 
number of trained scholars. The men who receive their 
doctor’s degrees at our typical universities know the mean- 
ing of the most patient and microscopic research. Their 
quest for truth is the opposite pole from the quest for 
publicity and they are putting into the mind of the nation 
a new belief in quiet and undramatic ways, a new respect 
for the processes which turn from short cuts and take the 
long and difficult and sure way. Whatever a man’s field, 
the same fundamental habits go to make up the scholar. 
Though the scholars are not often seen in headlines they 
are giving a stability to our national mind which is quite 
beyond praise. 

14.—From early days we have produced thinkers. 
Sometimes they were men of dialectical processes like Jon- 
athan Edwards. Sometimes they were men of quick intui- 
tive insight like Emerson. We have not produced as many 
of them as we might well desire. We have not always 
provided for them the best soil. But we have produced 
them. And the reading of books like Dean Pound’s bril- 
lant study, “The Spirit of the Common Law,” reminds 
us that we are producing men of this type who apply 
their skill to particular fields with conspicuous ability. 


THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN MIND 71 


There is no point where more encouragement should be 
given than to the men who give any sort of promise of 
being able to think. 

15.—We have also produced our humanists. They have 
been poets and essayists ike Lowell. They have been 
men who have tried to live in the ight of the ages as well 
as the age. ‘There have been too few of them. But they 
point a way of great and increasing usefulness and power 
for our best young men. 

16.—We have had our apostles of revolt. There is no 
lack of them now. They fill the air with shrill cries. 
They say no end of things we ought to hear and heed. 
They say a good many things which are sheer foolishness. 
At least they prove that the yeast of life is moving with 
great vigour. They are shaking us out of provincialism. 
And even when they are wrong they bring great stimulus 
to our minds. 

17.—The men of social passion have made a great place 
for themselves in American life. Josiah Strong and 
Professor Rauschenbusch have struck a note which has 
echoed in every group of the American Republic. Their 
successors are teaching us that democracy has implications 
which reach far beyond the political field. 

18.—Then there are those men of lofty mind and wide 
perspective who are thinking of America in the terms of 
the whole world. They have achieved a noble cosmopoli- 
tan spirit. And their love of America is expressed in a 
splendid vision of world-wide friendliness and world-wide 
service. Lincoln had moments when he was their prophet 
before their day. ‘They are the men who keep burning 
the most hopeful lights in the Republic. 

It is in this sort of land that young men are to learn 
knowledge and discretion. It is in this sort of land that 
wise men are to hear and increase in learning. It is in 
dealing with this complex and highly articulated mind 
that the students who graduate from this university are 
to make their own contribution not only to the mind but 
to the life of the Republic. 


LX 
THE STORY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE 


“Replenish the earth and subdue it.” Genesis 1: 28. 
“That in all things he might have the preeminence.” Col. 1: 18. 


The Christian religion comes to us making lofty claims 
and: bearing the credentials of far-reaching achievements. 
It stands before us as the interpreter of all life and the 
guide to all attainment. Nothing is foreign to its interest 
and nothing is beyond the reach of its authority. You 
can tell a great deal about any nation if you know the 
degree to which its characteristic activities have been 
influenced by the principles of the Christian faith. 

Our own land is a land of the most extraordinary com- 
mercial activity. In 1912 the Bureau of the Census of the 
United States estimated the total wealth of the nation at 
a monetary value of nearly one hundred and eighty-eight 
billions of dollars. The United States possesses more coal 
and iron and copper than any other nation. And these 
are the most important minerals of modern industry. It 
is said that we have water power capable of generating 
sixty million horse-power. Our agricultural resources are 
of the most commanding character and almost everything 
which natural resources do for a country has been done 
for us. Indeed, tin is the only metal used extensively in 
our manufacturing industries which must be procured 
from lands outside our own. 

The tale of American life covers only a few centuries. 
The fifteenth century tells the story of the discovery of 
America in the endeavour to find a new and short and 
available trade route. The sixteenth century is the cen- 
tury of exploration when hardy men discover the vastness 

72 


THE STORY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE 73 


and the possibilities of the new continent. The seven- 
teenth century is the period of settlement. It is important 
to note that those countries which saw in America merely 
a land to exploit, gradually lost their hold, and that coun- 
try which saw in America a land of possible homes became 
the dominant influence in the new world. The eighteenth 
century was the period of growth and of the achievement 
of independence. The mercantile system with its theory 
of colonies which existed for the sake of the motherland 
could not be applied permanently to the sturdy cluster of 
vigorous young commonwealths, and so America won its 
freedom. The nineteenth century was the period of 
expansion until the whole land from coast to coast was a 
part of a vast industrial organism as well as a political 
unit. The twentieth century promises to be the time when 
America will have its share in a stabilised commercial 
structure which includes the whole world. The story of 
the economic life of the United States has recently been 
told with graphic skill and with an unusual command of 
all the materials by Professor Thurman W. Van Metre 
of Columbia University. His book should be on the 
desk of every business man in America. 

There are some aspects of this story which are of par- 
ticular interest to all those who care about the deeper 
life of the country and which in the long run concern all 
those who think of the firmness of the industrial and 
economic structure of our nation’s life. 

In the early period the land began to be marked off 
by differences which became definitive. First tobacco 
and later cotton became the characteristic product of the 
South. Fisheries and then manufacturing establishments 
became the typical activities of New England. Later 
mining came to its great place in our productive mountain 
country, and lumber was an industry which moved from 
the East ever toward the West. 

The basal activities in relation to the economic structure 
are the production of the raw materials, the production 
of the finished product, the production of adequate means 


74 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


of transportation, and the production of a system of cur- 
rency and credit which will bear the weight of the whole 
edifice of the nation’s economic life. 

Now it is a curious and most interesting fact that James 
Hargreaves in England invented the spinning-jenny in 
1767, that Richard Arkwright invented the drawing frame 
two years after, and that Samuel Crompton invented the 
mule-spinner only a few years later. Edmund Cartwright 
invented the power loom in 1785. The cotton gin was 
invented by Eli Whitney in 1792. In other words, those 
fundamental inventions which brought in the great new 
industrial age were almost coeval with the life of the 
Republic itself. Speaking broadly, the new nation and 
the new industry were born together. And the people 
of the United States were not slow to take advantage 
of the tremendous opportunities which resulted from this 
situation. 

In the early days transportation was a difficult problem 
enough. Much transportation was by water along the 
coast or on the inland rivers. The Mississippi became a 
great and influential artery of trade. In 1755 Benjamin 
Franklin started a weekly service between Philadelphia 
and Boston announcing that a letter could be sent from 
one city and a reply received in three weeks. ‘This was 
one-half the time previously required. The era of canal 
building produced an enlargement of the area covered by 
water transportation. Its most characteristic product was 
the Erie Canal. In 1807 Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the 
Clermont, steamed up the Hudson from New York to 
Albany. In 1837 regular ocean service by steam began 
on a transatlantic scale. In the meantime the locomotive 
had been invented, and by 1837 there were 1,500 miles 
of railroad lines in the United States. Thus in the first 
half century of the life of the new country transportation 
was revolutionised by land and sea. Here again the 
United States took full advantage of the new opportuni- 
ties. In 1914 the mileage of railway in the United States 
had reached the high figure of 263,547. The experience 


THE STORY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE = 175 


of the new world in respect of shipping has been somewhat 
checkered. Just before the Revolutionary War, when 
England’s merchant marine contained less than eight 
thousand vessels, over two thousand of them were of 
American construction. There were times when American 
ships took a great part in the carrying trade of the world. 
But after the coming of the ocean steamship America fell 
behind, and only the embarrassments of the early years 
of the World War led Americans to see what a mistake 
it was to be so dependent upon foreign ships for the carry- 
ing of our trade. Then came a feverish period of building 
and for the time at least a new place for America upon 
the seas of the world. 

The nineteenth century saw the coming of inventions 
which transformed the activities of agricultural life. And 
here also America had its own place in the construction 
and the using of the inventions. For a long while the 
resources of the country seemed exhaustless. Then it 
began to be seen, in respect of lumber for instance, that 
we were exploiting the continent in the most careless way. 
And now the great conservation movement began. 

The period of cut-throat competition produced such 
confusion and hardship that in the period after the Civil 
War the era of combination came. Now great organisa- 
tions began to handle vast problems of production and 
transportation in a really remarkable way. 

The currency and credit elements in the stability of 
our economic life have had a history which is a matter 
of pride to none of us. A carelessness as to the funda- 
mental principles of sound activity in respect of money 
has brought terrible panic once and again. The wide- 
spread diffusion of the knowledge of the principles which 
he back of financial stability and the organisation of the 
reserve bank system may be hoped to have lessened the 
danger of tragic confusion coming from this cause. 

The American system of protection has been the cause 
of nation-wide battles. It is interesting to remember that 
Henry Clay was a foremost early advocate to the system 


76 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


and that John C. Calhoun, who later became the relentless 
foe of protection, led the fight for its adoption in 1816. 

At the approach of the World War and during its prog- 
ress America occupied a position of great power. In 1914 
the United States produced over four hundred and fifty- 
eight million tons of coal, in 1917 over five hundred and 
eighty-one million tons, and in the same year the produc- 
tion of pig iron was over thirty-eight million tons. In 1915 
the wheat crop was more than a billion bushels. In 1917 
the corn crop was over three billion bushels. The war 
cost us thirty-five billion dollars and over. Eleven billions 
were raised by taxation and about twenty-four billions 
by loans. 

The end of the war found the United States no longer 
a debtor nation, but the creditor of the greatest nations 
of Europe, the centre of the most productive and unspoiled 
territory in the world. 

We have only suggested a very few aspects of the quite 
amazing story of American commerce. And it has been 
preparatory to asking the question of the relation of Chris- 
tianity to this seething, bewildering, vital current of 
American industrial and commercial activity. 

In the first place we cannot be too clear in saying that 
in a fundamental way any commercial structure must 
have great elements of soundness in order to survive. 
There must be a large measure of honesty and faithful 
discharge of obligations and actual service of actual needs 
to keep | the machinery in action. The whole system sur- 
vives because of the good that is in it and in spite of the 
bad which it contains. And if the proportion of evil 
becomes too great the whole thing falls to the ground. 
We are saved from a good deal of superficial and needless 
cynicism when once we realise that no great system of 
industrial and commercial life which discarded the Chris- 
tian virtues could continue to function. It is the element 
of integrity which is basal. 

Then we can see when we look over the story of the 
life our nation that every great violation of the laws of 


THE STORY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE 17 


goodness which are inherent in the Christian faith has 
been followed by an inevitable penalty. Take the matter 
of slavery. For the time it seemed that the economic 
prosperity of the South was on the side of this dark and 
terrible institution. It seemed that it was essential to 
the very organism of Southern industrial life. And what 
was the result? ree labour was driven away from the 
South. It became the backward section of America. 
While the rest of the country moved forward it lagged 
behind. No great habits of thrift were cultivated. A sort 
of prodigality was an essential by-product of slavery. 
There was no such banking development as in other sec- 
tions. ‘There was a disease at the very heart of the eco- 
nomic system of the country. It is clear enough to us all 
today that slavery was the worst economic foe the South 
ever met. The laws of economic life and the laws of the 
Kingdom of God were not saying two things. They were 
saying the same thing. 

Take another illustration. In one and another period 
there has been the temptation to inflate values by artificial 
processes. The thing has gotten into the blood of the 
country. It has raged like an epidemic. And what has 
happened? After all the fever there has come a deadly 
reaction which has plunged the whole country into finan- 
cial depression. The laws of financial integrity have had 
a way of enforcing themselves in the long run. And here 
again the very thing which produced the panic was pre- 
cisely the sort of thing which a faithful Christian preacher 
would condemn. 

With the vast development of organisations in the 
period immediately behind us there came a series of great 
temptations. The organisation was inevitable and did 
much for the stabilising of American life. But there 
were new kinds of financial evil-doing which now became 
possible. And the very health of the system began soon 
to resist the new germs which had gotten into the organ- 
ism. The evil which flowed from the bad practices pro- 


78 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


duced the very sort of reaction which worked toward their 
cure. Mr. Roosevelt became the voice of economic law 
itself in his great campaigns. 

In just the opposite fashion, it was easy for men to 
become so angry at evil things in the system that they 
wanted to destroy the system itself. And here again that 
failure to distinguish between the good and eyil in the 
system wrought havoc. The laws of righteousness and 
the laws of economics spoke together. And their voice 
was against the lawlessness within the system and the 
lawlessness which would destroy the fabric of our economic 
life. 

The same thing is true in respect to all the conflicts 
between capital and labour. Whenever either group is 
contending for a sound principle the very energy of the 
economic structure is with them. Whenever either be- 
comes a class consciousness which ignores the common 
good the laws of economics become the servants of the 
laws of righteousness in securing severe penalties. 

It is this fundamental oneness of economic good with 
moral and spiritual welfare which forms the basis of a 
sound and enduring optimism. 

Speaking largely, the story of our industrial and eco- 
nomic life brings to our attention one matter of supreme 
importance. We have grown more rapidly in our indus- 
trial and commercial life than we have in our moral and 
spiritual life. Our character has not kept up with our 
prosperity. And if our analysis as just given is correct, 
that means that we must take decisive action for the sake 
of the economic structure itself. The most fundamental 
problem before American life is the matter of bringing 
our national character up to our specialised knowledge and 
our industrial and economic vigour. 

In other words, the thing which most needs to be done is 
precisely the thing for which the Church stands. If that 
thing is done effectively, our whole life will be built into 
new and enduring strength. If we fail at this point, we 


THE STORY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE 79 


will undermine at last the very economic structure which 
is the outstanding pride of so many of our countrymen. 

Here it is that the Man of Galilee confronts modern 
life. And here once again He is revealed as its supreme 
necessity and its essential guide. 


x 
COMMERCE AND CIVILISATION 


“Thy merchants were the princes of the earth.” Revelation 18: 23. 


There is a touch of magic about all great writing. <A 
little group of words are fastened together in such a fash- 
ion that they paint a picture or create an emotion or carry 
the subtle invisible power of a thought. Wonderful bits | 
of creative writing are found in the documents which go 
to make up the literature of the Old Testament and the 
New. Caught in the meshes of the words, the very scenes 
of far-off cities are held for the moment when they may 
be released into the thought of the reader with responsive 
mind and creative imagination. Such a piece of writing 
is that powerful poem of triumph over the fallen city of 
Rome which is cryptically expressed as the burning of 
Babylon in the eighteenth chapter of the book of Revela- 
tion. One feels the very atmosphere of the mighty city 
in the days of its far-flung and royal power. There are 
phrases of wonderful grace and poetic beauty in which 
the commerce of the great metropolis is described. And 
toward the end there comes this sentence alive with the 
sense of station and influence and power: “Thy merchants 
were the princes of the earth.” 

We are not to think today particularly of the indictment 
of Rome or of the cry of triumph as the painter of this 
majestic picture in words saw in imagination the fall of 
the great city. We are most interested in the almost 
unconscious revelation in the midst of the lurid picture 
of the place of commerce in the life of the Roman Empire. 
The picture of all the marvellous variety of trade, of its 

80 


COMMERCE AND CIVILISATION 81 


brilliant achievements, and of its regal position of com- 
merce suggests a theme which touches deeply the life of 
many an age and of none more than our own. That theme 
is “Commerce and Civilisation.” 

1.—The Commerce in Things. Commerce began in 
that very dim and remote past when two men discovered 
that what neither could do for himself, either could do 
for the other. What began so simply forms itself into a 
long and brilliant and marvellous story. It is a tale of 
many cities, each of which has been a powerful mart of 
trade. It carries us to the noise and bustle and stir in 
the streets of ancient Nineveh. It sweeps us into the 
city of Athens when, with all the beauty of its art and all 
the splendour of its achievements in letters, that town 
was a mistress of commerce as well as a queen of the mind 
of man. It brings us into the wide-lying, superbly built 
Roman roads in the days when they echoed to the feet of 
the stern-faced, highly disciplined Roman soldiers and at 
the same time were filled with that vast merchandise which 
came from every part of the world to the imperial city. 
The Middle Ages see their own marvellous revivals of 
commerce. The Italian cities which give a lustre all their 
own to this period have a development of commerce and 
finance which possesses its own bright romance. The 
grace and loveliness of their artistic achievement was 
paralleled by their commercial activity and the skill of 
their merchants in dealing with a far-reaching trade. 
Then the cities of the Hanseatic League become a vast 
political power and a veritable empire of commerce. The 
age of discovery inevitably turns into an age of trade. 
The Mediterranean ceases to be the sea of the world’s 
trade and the great ocean highways become the ways of 
the world’s commerce. Portugal becomes a centre of 
commercial achievement. Spain has an hour of glittering 
success in the activities of buying and selling. Holland 
makes commercial projects a means of the attainment of 
far-reaching power. ‘Then the struggle narrows to the 
great contention between England and France. It is a 


82 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


conflict, of political ambitions. It is a conflict of religious 
rivalries. It is conspicuously a commercial struggle. And 
at its end England is triumphant both in the Old World 
and the New. The United States of America comes into 
being in the midst of great world movements. It is a 
carrying nation during the earlier stages of the Napoleonic 
wars. As time goes on its clipper ships become the most 
effective carriers of trade in all the world. Then the 
steam power of England drives the clipper ship from the 
highways of the deep. Rails spread over all the lands. 
Giants driven by steam move over all the seas. The ma- 
chine age transforms the productive and the transporting 
activities of all the world. Before the outbreak of the last 
great war the railroad mileage of the world spreads over 
more than six hundred thousand miles. In 1912 the world 
produces a billion and a third tons of coal. In 1913 the 
total registered merchant tonnage of the world reaches 
nearly forty-seven million tons. In the year 1913 the 
total trade of the world reaches a sum of about forty-two 
billion dollars. The tale whose outline we have but 
vaguely hinted is the story of the material basis of civili- 
sation. It is the tale at last of a world-wide cooperation 
for the supplying of the material needs of the human 
family. 

2.—The Commerce in Ideas. We have only discussed 
the material foundation of the commerce of the world, 
however, when we have passed swiftly over the tale of 
the commerce in things. And the subtler commerce which 
has moved parallel to the commerce in material goods 
expresses the very genius and the eternal values of civili- 
sation. ‘The commerce in ideas is a matter of the most 
commanding interest and of the most far-reaching signifi- 
cance. Wherever the trader has gone, the exchange of 
ideas has followed. And it is remarkable that the great 
ages of material exchange have been great ages of intel- 
lectual activity and great ages of the exchange of ideas. 
Is it not a matter of striking significance that the very 
period which produced Socrates and Atschylus and Eurip- 


COMMERCE AND CIVILISATION 83 


ides and Pericles was an age of far-reaching commercial 
activity. The day of a powerful trade was not a day 
hostile to great intellectual achievements in Athens. It 
was precisely a day of the very greatest vigour in all the 
things of the mind. The Italy of the rebirth of all the 
glorious things of the intellect and the taste was the Italy 
whose cities achieved a commercial and financial power 
which is one of the most impressive aspects of the life of 
the age. The cities of merchants and bankers were also 
cities alive with response to all the things of the mind. 
The days when England was laying the foundation of its 
world-wide commercial supremacy, the days of the Tudors 
and of the building of the fleets which scoured the seas 
of the world, were the days of Shakespeare and all the 
glory of mental prowess which we still remember at the 
very mention of the word Elizabethan. The days when 
our own clipper ships were on all the seas found the New 
England which built these ships and to whose ports they 
returned the centre of a glowing and inspiring intellectual 
life. Indeed, it is not too much to say that great ages 
of commercial activity have a way of being great ages 
of intellectual achievement. The two types of commerce 
supplement each other. And each makes the other more 
potent and more solid in its achievement. 

By its very nature the intellectual commerce is a world- 
wide activity. The universities of the Middle Ages 
brought students from every civilised nation, and it was 
the universality of their geographical appeal which gave 
them their name. The ideas of the leaders of every nation 
thus became the property of the whole republic of the 
mind. Erasmus was a citizen of every nation where 
thought was valued and scholarship was venerated. The 
world trade of the universities is the last to be broken 
with the coming of great wars. It is the first to be renewed 
after the return of peace. Upon the solid foundation of 
material achievement and material well-being the mer- 
chant princes of the mind build their great palaces of 
thought. From the Greek speculators of the sixth century 


84 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


B.C., through the great days in Athens and Rome and 
Alexandria, and the days of the founding of the universi- 
ties of Paris and Oxford and Cambridge and Bologna, 
on to our own day of international exchange in matters 
of learning, it has been the very genius of men of knowl- 
edge to exchange their products. The scholar has always 
felt that he only really possessed that which he shared. 
The commerce of the mind has given to the civilised life 
of man a kind of royal splendour. 

38.—The Commerce in Ideals. There is an even 
subtler and finer traffic than the exchange of ideas. This 
is the commerce of ideals. More than rare silks were 
carried out to the world from India. And more than a 
profound Eastern philosophy moved through the gates of 
far-off cities from this land of deep and brooding thought. 
An ideal of life with infinite and gracious serenity moved 
through all barriers, and even the hurrying, practical 
West has never been able to forget for long that majestic 
quiet which the East has taught the world to admire and 
sometimes to imitate. More than a brilliant philosophy 
and a seminal science went out to the world from Greece. 
The spirit of Attica is a very delicate and evasive thing. 
But the light of Hellas still burns wherever there are 
lofty standards of taste and wherever adventure of living 
is filled with the passion for symmetry and harmonious 
loveliness. More than bales of material merchandise and 
minds overflowing with clear and mighty thoughts moved 
along the Roman roads. The great light of the spirit 
which burned in the life of Jesus of Nazareth glowed in 
the eyes of Paul as he moved along these Roman roads or 
entered some Mediterranean merchant ship carrying the 
invisible merchandise of a new and transforming religion 
for a weary and decadent world. Every modern railway 
route and every highway of the sea carries its dauntless 
adventurers of the spirit who are moving about the world 
with those wares of the spirit which Christianity has to 
offer to the world. And so it has already become true 
that as far as the civilised world is concerned and more 


COMMERCE AND CIVILISATION 85 


rapidly than we may think, as far as all the world is 
concerned, Jesus has become the conscience of the earth. 
Try to escape it as we may, we see matters of right and 
wrong through His eyes. And we cannot escape the mea- 
surement of ultimate values by His standards. The 
supreme achievement in the commerce in ideals is the 
world-wide diffusion of the spirit and the standards of 
Jesus Christ. All subtle insights of taste, all glowing 
intuitions of goodness, all hearty and happy ideals of 
human relations, all the passion for beauty and for good- 
ness and for that world-wide triumph of brotherhood 
which is the gift of a great ethical love, belong to this 
commerce in ideals which is all the while uplifting and 
transforming human society. These things may seem 
weak and impotent because they are always invisible and 
often impalpable. Measured by the ages, they are seen 
supreme. Nations either accept them and live or reject 
them and fall into disintegration and decay. Moral and 
spiritual ideals are the only ultimately strong things in all 
the world. 

The task of the present clearly enough is to secure and 
preserve a proper balance between these varied types of 
commerce. The commerce in things itself breaks down 
without the maintenance of those invisible standards which 
make it possible to venture commercial transactions in the 
name of dependable good faith. A world without charac- 
ter would be a world without banks and without credit 
and a world in which all the movements of organised trade 
would come to an end. The commerce in ideas needs the 
perpetual contact with those practical relationships which 
have so large a share in making up the commerce in things. 
The vague abstraction which removes the mind from grip- 
ping human problems becomes impossible if the two types 
of commerce grow together, each feeding the other, each 
influenced and stabilised by the other. So the world of 
ideas and the world of the facts which lie at the base of 
all human relationships are kept in cooperative contact. 
The commerce in things and the commerce in ideas must 


86 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


be crowned by the greatest elements of all. And these 
are found in the realm of ideals. Even in the world of 
things, it is your practical dreamer who achieves the most. 
And the stability of the most simple and practical things 
is made more certain if the merchandise of great ideals 
moves in constant companionship with the daily activities 
of the marts of trade. Permanent ideals must be put in 
command. Creative ideas must be perpetually produced 
and perpetually disseminated. And so the trafiic in things 
is prevented from becoming a good custom which corrupts 
the world. 2 

Those who go out from this university will have the 
summoning opportunity of sharing in that productive 
endeavour which shall make the mighty commerce in 
things which characterises our age, the material founda- 
tion upon which is built a commerce in ideas which shall 
be equally brilliant and powerful and a commerce in ideals 
which shall crown our civilisation with moral and spiritual 
vigour. It is not a task for weaklings, but strong men 
and women will scent the battle from afar and will be 
glad of a conflict desperate enough to enlist every resource 
of endurance and every quality of strength. That we 
shall make our intellectual and spiritual output the equal 
of our material product is the demand which a vital civili- 
sation makes of the men and women who are alive in the 
world today. And if we should find that the kindling 
and commanding Teacher who filled the civilisation of 
the Mediterranean with the splendour of His ideals knows 
the secret of triumphant achievement and is ready to share 
it with us, it will only be another example of the fashion 
in which Christianity emerges to meet the critical hour 
in the life of the world. 


XI 
THE ROMANCE OF LAW 


The little books about Alice in Wonderland have no 
end of philosophical significance. If a really powerful 
metaphysician is sadly put to it he is likely to find that 
some bit of an illustration from Alice’s adventures will 
put him on his way again. To Alice we may go to get a 
running start for the discussion of the relation of law to 
free human beings. It will be remembered that once Alice 
played a game of croquet in Wonderland. It was a rather 
difficult game; for the mallets and the balls and the arches 
were alive. And the mallets would not strike at the right 
time. And the arches marched away sulking. And the 
balls went off on their own capricious ways. It was rather 
hard, declared Alice, to play a game of croquet under such 
conditions. ‘That, to be sure, is just what is the matter 
with life. That is what makes living so frightfully com- 
plex. For life is a game where all the mallets and the 
balls and the arches are alive. An expert bookkeeper who 
became a teacher of children complained bitterly that 
figures would stay where you put them on the page. But 
children were like mad figures dancing all over the page 
and always turning up where they were not wanted. 

As a matter of fact, if we are thinking of order, it may 
well seem that there is a great deal to be said for autoc- 
racy. Freedom is dreadfully upsetting. I suppose every 
housewife is a born autocrat. Imagine what her feelings 
would be if when she went to make up a bed the pillows 
set up a little revolution and refused to remain where she 
placed them. And imagine the sheets and the quilts 
declaring that they will not be put upon and will do just 

87 


88 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


as they like. A business man is likely to feel toward his 
employes pretty much as this housewife would feel toward 
the pillows and the sheets and the quilts. Yet the em- 
ployes are alive. They are not pillows and sheets. They 
are not arches and balls. And how are we ever to get both 
efficiency and liberty in a world where it is so easy for 
the autocrat to be mechanically efficient and so hard for 
the apostle of freedom to be stable and productive! 

As a matter of fact, things are rather badly mixed up 
and sometimes it is hard to keep our conscience within 
speaking distance of our feelings. Take the case of 
Falstaff and the gay Prince Hal. We do not approve of 
them. But we cannot deny their fascination. And when 
Prince Hal becomes a stable king and refuses to recognise 
the old vagabond with whom he had spent such care-free 
Bohemian days and nights, our judgment goes with the 
king and our hearts go with the gay old rogue. Yet we 
know that life must be built upon a broad and solid foun- 
dation of law. Our minds follow the legal necessity, but 
our feelings are all too likely to desire to “spice the good 
a trifle with a little dust of harm.” The whole problem 
is difficult and searching enough. And it deserves our 
closest and our clearest thought. 

If we take the bit in our teeth and determine to canter 
away on a real adventure of thinking, I suppose our first 
discovery will be that we never dislike things because 
they are right. We dislike them because they are neces- 
sary. There seems to be an element of coercion in the 
good which arouses our antagonism. It is really goodness 
in the green-apple stage to which we object. For few of 
us are so perverse as to be irresponsive to the charm of 
mellow and mature and spontaneous goodness. And here 
we may find a clue to guide us upon our difficult way. It 
may be that law is not nearly so repulsive as our terribly 
free young intellectuals would have us believe. It may 
be that a law is only unlovely when it has gotten on our 
nerves. It is just possible that it would be very attractive 
if it once got into your heart. We make no special claim 


THE ROMANCE OF LAW 89 


for originality in respect of this suggestion. In fact, it 
was made by a curiously human prophet named Jeremiah 
as early as the sixth or seventh century B.C. But it is 
an insight which if old is very much out of sight so far 
as current discussion is concerned. And so we may be 
pardoned if we bring it out of the rubbish in the cellar 
of the world’s mind and give it a bit of an airing. 

Perhaps we may put the matter in this way: When 
freedom is unrestrained by law, the lives of men and the 
lives of nations come to terrible and complete disintegra- 
tion. When law is uninspired by freedom, life becomes 
conventional and hard and mechanical. Its deserts with 
their hot and unproductive sands seem to be calling out 
for apostles of revolt. But when law has freedom at the 
heart of it, when we do what we ought to do, not merely 
driven by a sense of duty, but guided by an eager heart, 
then all is changed. When you obey the law because you 
love to do it, you have all the fun which comes from license 
and all the character which comes from obedience. When 
the law is set to music it has the delightful characteristics 
of indulgence and none of the bad effects which come from 
riotous and indulgent ways. 

When we stop to think of it, there is no freedom which 
is not soundly based in law. I never felt such a delicious 
sense of freedom as when one day during the war I went 
flying over London in a big Handley-Page bombing ma- 
chine. I felt as if I could shake my fist at the law of 
gravitation. But was that flight a defiance of law? In 
fact, it was the most definite result of the most complete 
obedience to no end of physical laws. If for a single 
second any one of these laws had been disobeyed, the 
career of that bombing machine would have come quickly 
to anend. Yet there we were, with all the vast exhilara- 
tion of flight! At that moment we discovered the romance 
of law. For when we learn that obedience is emancipa- 
tion, we have made one of the most astounding discoveries 
of life. The great laws take care of themselves. As Mr. 
Chesterton once said, “If a man jumps from a cliff he 


90 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


does not break the law of gravitation, he only illustrates 
it.” We make laws our slaves when we obey them. We 
pull the very elements of our lives apart when we defy 
them. 

This freedom of obedience is structural in that noble 
liberty which belongs to a democracy. The real difficulty 
with an anarchy would be that everybody would always 
be in the way of everybody else. Law is a device by 
which I secure a free path on condition that I give another 
man a free path. So law is the under side of freedom. 
And freedom is the other side of law. Until there is 
an effectively functioning law against murder there is no 
security in the freedom of life. Until there is a law to 
protect property there is no real freedom to build noble 
houses. For without the protection of law nobody will 
take the risks. Every step in civilisation involves the 
sacrifice of some license in the name of constructive lib- 
erty, the surrender of something with seeds of evil in it 
for the sake of the common good. In the most practical 
sort of way the eighteenth amendment has given new free- 
dom to bank accounts, new liberty to homes of comfort, 
new opportunity for food and clothing, and no end of those 
elements which go to make up a prosperous life. It may 
seem terribly hard to give up the saloon. It seems a good 
deal easier when you hear the gay and contented laugh- 
ter of multitudes of happy children emancipated from a 
terrible servitude to poverty and fear. There is an 
unsuspected romance even about the Volstead Act! 

If Kipling was right in declaring that there are laws 
for the jungle, we may know that we are a good deal more 
sure to be right when we declare that there are funda- 
mental laws for the great family life of a nation. Cities 
and commonwealths can have no real freedom if they 
forget their loves and live by their hates. You can divide 
the inhabitants of any town or state racially and relig- 
iously into A-ites and B-ites and C-ites. And the followers © 
of the battle flag A can resolve that no follower of B or C 
shall be a member of the council or shall hold the office 


THE ROMANCE OF LAW 91 


of mayor or shall be governor of the state. So the A-ites 
and B-ites and the C-ites can hate and plot and plan, each 
defeating the purpose of the other, while the city and the 
state sink lower and lower. The law of friendliness is 
the way of escape from all these things. And it has in it 
all the romance of escape from the bitter, cruel days when 
suspicion fed upon its own fevers and needed no fuel 
of facts. 

When any group of men substitute their own will for 
the careful and stable processes of law, you have a bad 
day for the nation and a bad day for the world. There 
is no religious group and there is no racial group which 
can be shut out from the protection of the basic laws of 
our land. There is one structural law. And its protec- 
tions and its penalties belong alike to Protestant and 
Catholic and Jew, to white and yellow and black. There 
is no more bitter irony in our day than the use of a blazing 
cross to symbolise an appeal to the very sort of hot and 
passionate prejudice which it is the mission of the cross 
of Christ to abolish from the earth. It would be a happy 
thing if every man who joins a secret society which sub- 
stitutes the decision of prejudice and passion for the stable 
ways of law could be deprived of the right to exercise the 
franchise. 

Lawlessness defeats itself in the long run. For the 
laws which are flouted break the lawbreakers completely 
enough at last. But the pathos of it all is that only dust 
and ashes are left behind. There is a far nobler and a 
far more hopeful way to deal with the problem of the 
relation of law and freedom. That is the way of the men 
and women who learn the secret of the high adventure, 
the gracious romance, the glorious freedom which come 
only to those who keep the law. Robert Browning found 
it infinitely more exciting to be true to his wife than some 
contemporary men of letters find it to be false to theirs. 
It all comes at last to the difference between the Old Tes- 
tament and the New. ‘The one is the literature of a 
kingly conscience. The other is the literature of an 


92 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


enfranchised heart. The men of the New Testament have 
found a new motive which transforms old acts. They still 
keep the ten commandments. But now the ten command- 
ments have been turned into a marching song. It is not 
an escape from law but an escape in law which we need. 
The man who discovers the romance of law can be as free 
as the anarchist would like to be and at the same moment 
as nobly obedient as the Apostle Paul. The emancipated 
heart has at last no quarrel with the law-abiding life. If 
America should discover the romance of law, the future 
of this Republic would be secure. 


XII 
HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 


Benjamin Kidd died only a little while ago. Mr. H. 
G. Wells is still very much alive and his pen is very pro- 
lific. The two men do not suggest thought of any very 
definite affinity of mind or method. The patient and 
painstaking thinker very slowly and carefully rising from 
a sure basis of gathered facts to a substantial and signifi- 
cant generalisation, and the agile social apostle with the 
darting mind ignoring facts which he does not like and 
pouncing upon facts which help him, do indeed seem to 
be rather far apart. It is a matter for more than a 
moment’s notice that the two stand together on a subject 
which each regards as of the most far-reaching importance. 
Benjamin Kidd’s “Science of Power” was a plea for 
education which placed the whole destiny of the race in 
the hands of its schoolmasters. Mr. Wells’ “Salvaging of 
Civilisation” sees in a world-wide and adequate program 
of education the one method of saving the whole fabric 
of our orderly and slowly built life from disintegration 
and decay. The thoughtful man can scarcely deny, if 
he approaches these matters with some intellectual and 
social prospective, that the world must be made into an 
organism if the most priceless treasures of civilisation are 
to be conserved. And the world cannot be made organic 
without education. The teacher stands in a place of 
strategy. 

Religious education attempts to make the moral and 
social and spiritual idealism of the race the possession of 
each new generation. When it is Christian it interprets 
all life by means of the personality, the experience, the 

93 


94 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


teachings, and the achievements of Jesus. Ralph Waldo 
Emerson once said of the Man of Galilee, ““He takes men 
out of time and makes them feel eternity.” In the deepest 
sense religious education sees the temporal in the light 
of the eternal. It sees all great hope at last as based on 
the character of the Father whose face we have seen in 
the face of Jesus Christ. It founds its expectations upon 
the unchangeable purpose of the Eternal and Everlasting 
God. 

The Teacher possesses a long and distinguished tradi- 
tion. It is a tale of wisdom and folly, of success and 
failure. To receive the vital elements in all methods and 
all schools and to go on with open and eager mind to new 
discovery and new teaching skill is a sufficiently difficult 
task. The tragedy which haunts educational history is 
just the fashion in which the good of an old method has 
sometimes vanished with its evil. It is never a good 
bargain to sell an old good even for a new good. ‘That 
is mere change and not progress. When you keep the old 
good and add the new you have something which deserves 
the name of evolution. There was a day when children 
were taught to remember without being taught to think. 
It does not follow that when we teach them to think we 
cannot also teach them to remember. 

The world since Rousseau has studied the unfolding 
nature of the child as that was never studied before. ‘The 
world since Pestalozzi and Froebel has attained a sense 
of the sacredness of the developing life which has come 
to a unique expression in the theories and practices of 
Maria Montessori. 

The understanding of the importance of establishing 
a friendly contact with the things which make up the 
objective world and its relationships has been coming to 
more and more articulate form until we reach Dr. John 
Dewey’s Experimental School in Chicago. The method 
by which knowledge grows has been investigated in its 
educational relationships in fuller and fuller fashion since 
the days of Herbart. 


HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 95 


The vast scientific achievements of the nineteenth cen- 
tury have had their own effect upon the theory and practice 
of education. They have given new subjects. They have 
given new methods. The statistical methods and measure- 
ments introduced by Professor Thorndike of Columbia 
have been assuming increasing importance in educational 
activities. 

The exponent of religious education lives in this world 
of ideas and ideals and methods. Without running into 
the fallacy of over-simplification, I think one may say 
that through all the variety of interpretation and activity 
two attitudes emerge. One of them instinctively thinks 
of education as a process as definite as a mathematical 
demonstration moving among the impersonal forces of the 
mechanical world. The other thinks of education in the 
terms of a rich and ample personal consciousness. One 
leads to educational methods based upon mechanical 
science. The other leads to methods based upon scientific 
humanism. 

The leader in religious education is eager to welcome 
every help which comes from all the research and experi- 
ment of the last two centuries. He is too wise to turn 
with complete repudiation from any method until he has 
studied it with great care. He knows that, however glar- 
ing its faults, the fact that it gets a hearing at all is 
virtually a witness to some truth which has been neglected 
and to which it gives vigorous if one-sided expression. 
But with all this catholicity of spirit, the religious teacher 
knows that the education which reduces life to mechanics 
must be distinguished from the education which frankly 
admits that there are mechanical aspects in the personal 
life, but finds its secret in the free-moving mind journey- 
ing through the world on its vast adventure of choice and 
assimilation. This, indeed, is the fundamental matter 
for that historic humanism which has in it the secret of 
creative periods in art, in letters, in religion, and in life. 

One must admit that in this matter, at least, Rousseau 
was on the side of the angels, and the great leaders of the 


96 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


nineteenth century in educational thinking followed in 
his train. One must also admit that a view of education 
as a process crowned by the capacity to collect and classify 
facts rather than by the power to exercise a rich and varied 
personal life has become widely prevalent. Some sense of 
this was doubtless behind Professor James’ clever phrase 
regarding the “Ph.D. octopus.” One does not mean for 
a moment to attack technical scholarship. One does not 
mean for a moment to depreciate all the rare and notable 
service of the masters of research. One does mean that 
a particular feature of brilliant technical scholarship is 
not to be confused with the great human goal of education. 

The great truths and sanctions of the Christian religion 
lend themselves in the happiest fashion to the very genius 
of humanistic training. The religion which is based upon 
personality gives personality its right place in education. 
The literature of the Old Testament and the New and all 
the great and gracious story of Christian heroism and 
achievement come nobly out of life and in their fine ger- 
minal power are creative of more life. The sharp sense 
of ethical contrast and the shock of moral conflict so 
inherent in all the great documents of the Christian 
religion kindle and develop the sense of personal responsi- 
bility and personal power. The religion which in that 
powerful leader Paul transcended the mechanical and 
came to be nobly spontaneous has the deepest kinship 
with that creative freedom which is so essential to the 
humanistic spirit. And the personality of Jesus Christ 
lifts all truth from abstraction and sets it shining in 
human eyes and working with human hands. Ethical 
humanism has its living expression in the Man of Galilee. 
Rising from this warmly human contact, all the heights 
of thought and volition are touched as the face of the 
Master of Life Himself is seen in the face of the Master 
of Men. 

The religious teacher has many a practical task in the 
adjustment of his teaching to growing knowledge and his 
familiarity with the results of Old and New Testament 


HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 97 


criticism, and all the progress of the investigating mind 
will play a definite part in his equipment. He will be a 
keen and eager student of all those methods by which the 
Christian ideal is made compelling for the individual, for 
the family, for the city, the countryside, the nation, and 
the world. His Christian humanism will reach as far 
as the interests and needs of humanity. He will open 
his mind to every nobly vital and wholesomely beautiful 
thing in all the world. For they all belong to him and 
to his students. He will live under the perpetual illumi- 
nation of that religion which begins with the personality 
of God and brings to completion and fulfillment the 
personality of man. 


XITI 
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS OF THE MIND 


“That in all things He might have the preeminence.” Colossians 
: 18. 


There is a curious and interesting contrast between the 
Divine Comedy of Dante and the Pilgrim’s Progress of 
Bunyan. The one might take as its motto the words of 
the Latin poet Terence, “AJ] that concerns humanity is 
of interest to me.”’ Some characters from every one of 
the centuries of civilised life before Dante appear in the 
Divine Comedy. History and philosophy and all the vast 
and varied interests of men move through its pages. The 
white ight of a Christian purpose plays through the prism 
of Dante’s mind and comes forth in all the brightly 
shining and variegated colours of the rainbow. The light 
of a Christian interpretation falls upon every aspect of 
human life. The whole human story is seen subspecies 
aeternatis. A cosmopolitan mind has been mastered by 
the Christian sanctions but it remains cosmopolitan still. 

The masterpiece of Bunyan, on the other hand, is a clear 
and powerful mountain stream making its tempestuous 
way among precipitous gorges. It is full of vigour and 
energy, of the spice of a shrewd and homely mind, of the 
sudden glory of an imagination kindled by divinely beau- 
tiful thoughts and holy hopes and expectations. It is a 
thin white light of evangelical purpose, sharp with an edge 
like a flaming sword, but keeping the reticence and isola- 
tion of its own great purpose. Bunyan is sure of the white 
light. He is a bit afraid of the rainbow. It suggests a 
little too much the colours of Vanity Fair. And it has 

98 


THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS OF THE MIND § 99 


never occurred to him that Vanity Fair can be made 
Christian without going into sackcloth and ashes. 

You can escape from the world by fleeing from it. You 
can also escape from the world by transforming it. It is 
of the escape by flight that Bunyan writes with such 
marvellous and memorable power. 

Now one would not for a moment deny the place and 
power of the mood of Bunyan. And the very terrible 
sharpness of his demand, without hesitation or evasion or 
compromise, gives added momentum to his message. The 
time comes when a man must fly from the City of Destruc- 
tion. And times of such unhesitating and remorseless 
decision come to all of us. But one remembers that while 
Lot fled from Sodom, Isaiah remained in Jerusalem and 
used all his powers in calling it to a new life, and fed 
his soul upon a vision of the ideal Jerusalem as a “right- 
eous town.” The time of flight may come. In the mean- 
time it is well to remember that to fly is easier than to 
transform, and to keep in mind the tremendous petition 
in the intercessory prayer of Jesus, “Not that Thou 
shouldst take them from the world, but that Thou shouldst 
keep them from the evil.” 

The Divine Comedy has been called the voice of ten 
silent centuries. The Pilgrim’s Progress is the typical 
story of one profound aspect of the experience of every 
seeking, struggling soul which finds its way into the light 
of God. We owe a great debt to Bunyan. He relieves 
the problem of life of all artificial complexities. He 
reduces it to ultimate and tragic simplicity. He confronts 
us with the last and essential and necessary choice. All 
this is good. And in certain supreme moments it will 
be well for us if we have Bunyan at our side. But do 
these moments exhaust the meaning of life? Are there 
not ampler perspectives which belong to the Christian 
practice of living? Do we not need the many-coloured 
rainbow as well as the fine white light? Did not Dante 
perform a service for the fourteenth century which waits 
to be rendered to the twentieth? Is there not a Pilgrim’s 


100 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


Progress of man’s mind sweeping through ampler terri- 
tories than those which come within the range of Bunyan’s 
thought? Is there not a vast and far-reaching sense in 
which all the complicated aspects of modern life must 
feel the sway of Christ “that in all He may have the 
preeminence” ¢ 

The moment we ask these questions we find our thought 
introduced to fertile fields of investigation. And as we 
pursue them we come to believe that the new adventure 
of seeing all things in our big and varied world with the 
eyes of Jesus, allowing Him to be the interpreter and 
the master of the great world of thought and action in 
which we dwell, is a particularly summoning opportunity 
for the man and the woman who have acknowledged the 
great allegiance. 

The young man in the contemporary university who 
attempts the high adventure of the new Pilgrim’s Progress 
of the mind is likely to find himself confronted first of 
all by the solid bulk of modern Science. Here is a vast 
and stable mountain. Over its trails he must travel as 
he goes to the city celestial of the mind. There have been 
varied attitudes toward this vast mass thrown up from 
the depths of the mind of man. Some men have regarded 
the whole as a wall built by the foes of the Lord of man. 
Here is a fortification which must be stormed. Here is 
a wall built around a City of Jericho. Let us march 
about the city seven times and let the wall fall. There 
has been a good deal of marching. There has been a good 
deal of shouting. But so far the wall has not fallen. 
And the serious thinkers among us have fairly well made 
up their minds that the wall will not fall. Some of them 
even believe that the fortification is built about the city 
of God Himself and that the palm trees within its circuit 
belong to the beauty of the new Jerusalem. 

There have been men, to go back to our figure of a 
mountain, who believe that there is a way around this 
rugged formation. Religion has nothing to do with 
science. Let us turn aside and find an easy and charming 


THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS OF THE MIND 101 


passage among the fertile valleys at the foot of the moun- 
tain. But the fertile valleys, it turns out, do not have 
roads which lead to the celestial city of the mind. And the 
man who ignores science as he journeys forward on the 
great adventure has failed to meet an essential experience. 
He can never give an enlightened mind to Christ if he tries 
to evade the searching problems raised by modern scientific 
investigation. The way lies over the mountain, by many 
a dizzy trail and through many a lofty pass. And on that 
way the great Companion of the mind of man reveals 
many a new glory of the religion which brings the mind 
of man to rest such as a loftily flying bird finds in its nest 
above the crag after long and wearying flight. 

The students of the physical sciences and especially the 
students of the biological sciences all the while stand in 
the presence of vast and inspiring and creative mystery. 
What is the justification of that dauntless faith which 
believes that the universe is constructed along rational 
lines, that it can be understood by the mind of the explor- 
ing man? Surely there is no more glorious adventure 
than that involved in such a faith. And the basis and the 
support of such an adventure is the living God. When 
we see God in the uniformities of nature, when we see 
God in the vast and varied experiences of living things, 
physics and biology without ceasing to be sciences become 
gospels. And so the mind meets the afflatus of religion 
in the temple of science itself. The process of evolution 
is only seen in its full wonder when the physical is trans- 
cended and included in the mental, and these find their 
interpretation in the moral, and all comes to full expres- 
sion in the spiritual. The man who has seen in deep 
and intuitive understanding the place of Christ as the 
consummation of the whole process has a new definition 
of the meaning of evolution and of its moral and spiritual 
possibilities. And here is one of the noblest and greatest 
of the journeys in the Pilgrim’s Progress of the mind. 

The world in which we dwell today is spelling the word 
organisation with huge and massive capital letters. We 


102 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


are changing the appearance of the surface of the land, 
and are quite transforming the traffic of the seas through 
that capacity for organisation which makes possible the 
production and the distribution of the wares of our world 
upon such a scale as never before was possible. Some- 
times the individual seems quite lost in the manifold and 
intricate machinery of our complicated industrial life. 
Sometimes it seems as if the wheels and dynamos we have 
made have become our tyrants and rule us from thrones 
of steel. 

The man who journeys forth as a pilgrim whose mind 
is to master life in the name of the great Leader must 
plunge into this welter of organisation. He must enter 
this civilisation of wheels and belts. He must travel amid 
smoking factories and all the grim turbulence of noisy 
machinery. And he must find a fashion in which he can 
think of personality and organisation and all the tools 
of organisation in such a way that the mind of the man 
is dominant over all that he has made. When men’s tools 
rise up to fight them the men must join together and 
master their tools. When human organisations deplete 
the personality which they should enrich, then men must 
learn to organise for the development of personality. They 
must make their organisation the foe of exploitation and 
not its servant. They must use the machinery of life for 
the sake of manhood. . 

As a man tries to carry a searchingly earnest mind 
through all the confusion of the thought and the activities 
to which organisation has given rise, there is no guide 
like the one ineffable Master to whom personality was 
always first and things were always second. The vision 
of the whole intricate organisation of the modern world 
bent to the purpose of the will of Christ is one of the 
noblest inspirations which can come to the mind of man. 
And as many men see it and live in the light of it, they 
labour with the music of a glorious Pilgrim’s chorus giv- 
ing them gladness as they pursue their tasks. 

The Christian world has often seemed rather afraid 


THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS OF THE MIND 103 


of Art since the days of the Reformation and especially 
since the impact of some aspects of the Puritan movement 
have been felt. It has not always been seen that the love 
of noble beauty is already on the way to the love of God, 
and that if the love of goodness and of God are taken from 
the love of beauty only something very dark and unlovely 
remains. It is noble piety which puts rich and nourishing 
fruit within the apple of Sodom in the place where so 
often men have only found dust and ashes. 

The sense of beauty is not a strange and added thing 
which has no place in a normal experience. It is as much 
a part of man as the cry of the body for food and of the 
mind for truth. It may be the vehicle of noble inspira- 
tion. It may be dragged down to dark levels of unholy 
indulgence. 

The Pilgrim who would claim that his mind has a right 
to command the allegiance of every aspect of human expe- 
rience in the name of the Lordship of Christ, has many 
a fine and difficult and challenging journey to make in the 
realm of beauty. It is possible to interpret beauty from 
the position of its ultimate place in the heart of God. It 
is possible to interpret beauty from the standpoint of the 
rush of bodily desire and the imperious command of the 
selfish will. It is possible to interpret it from above or 
from below. And so interpreted it will lift life up or 
drag life down. The Pilgrim of the great allegiance sees 
in the sense of beauty a great ally in his fight for goodness 
in the world. He knows that beauty is safe, when Jesus 
Christ is its King. And he knows that it can be kept 
warm and glowing and rich and human even as it sights 
the distant summits of etherial and heavenly loveliness. 
Art is to be the friend and not the foe of those crusaders 
who would rescue the temple as well as the tomb of Christ 
from unclean hands. 

There are many other journeys in the Pilgrim’s Prog- 
ress of the mind. But the man who has pursued the far 
mountain trails of science to their distant fastnesses with 
a constant sense of the Lordship of Christ, who has strug- 


104 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


gled in the smoke and grime and mechanical efficiency 
of our great organisations, who under the same high 
leadership has seen the sordid and the voluptuous in art 
become the gracious and the pure and the nobly creative, 
with the Master at the heart of it all: the man who has 
taken these journeys and has seen these sights knows 
something of the preeminence of Christ. He has his 
place in that band which sees from afar the City Celestial 
where the mind in full satisfaction watches every thought 
and activity of man bow in allegiance before the King of 
Kings. So do the Divine Comedy and the Pilgrim’s 
Progress become one, whiteness of light and richness of 
rainbow, in the experience of the modern Pilgrim. 


XIV 


THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE COLLEGE 
GRADUATE 


The college man has a mind of hisown. He has a mind 
of his own on the campus. He has a mind of his own 
after his graduation. By the college man, I mean the 
man in a college of liberal arts and not the man in a 
professional or technical school. And I mean the college 
woman as well as the college man. The study of this 
college type of mind is a fascinating and perhaps some- 
times a rather disconcerting adventure in mental analysis. 

The campus offers its own subtle and persuasive in- 
fluences. It gives a man an experience which is not quite 
like anything which has come to him before and not quite 
like anything which will come to him later. It is a little 
commonwealth of varied activity full of the most varied 
interest and appeal. Perhaps the one outstanding need 
of colleges of liberal arts in America is a frank recogni- 
tion that the intellectual life ought to be a student activity. 
One would not rob the campus of all its interest in track 
activities and baseball and football and basketball and all 
the varied social expressions of the student personality. 
But the intellectual life itself is the most fascinating sort 
of game in all the world. And it is really not too much 
to suggest that it is a game which ought to be played in 
our American colleges. The common rooms in a school 
like Oxford, and with their easy and happy and sometimes 
bantering give and take in the things of the mind, represent 
a kind of social expression of the intellectual life which 
lifts it from a self-conscious sort of drudgery to an activity 
full of the most delightful sort of stimulus and vigorous 
athletic energy. 

105 


106 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


But it is not my purpose on this Commencement occa- 
sion to spend my time reminding those who are about to 
depart from this institution of learning of the possibilities 
of the life which they are just about to. leave behind. 
Commencement Day does not belong to the undergradu- 
ates. There is, however, one matter of the utmost impor- 
tance to those whom the college is honouring with the seal 
of its confidence. And that has to do with the fashion in 
which the intellectual life is to be kept alive and vigorous 
in all the long years which stretch beyond the day when 
the college halls are left behind. And so I am asking 
you to think with me for a little while of the intellectual 
life of the college graduate. 

It may seem to many that with the invasion of the 
college of liberal arts by the junior college from below 
and the professional schools from above the venerable 
institution which has developed mellow culture in so many 
centuries is being pressed between great stones which leave 
little promise for a fruitful hfe. Despite the college work 
done away from colleges and the pre-medial, and pre-legal, 
and pre-commercial courses, however, it is still possible 
to assume that the typical college graduate has in some 
fashion been introduced to the field of human knowledge 
and achievement, of experiment and research of which 
he is to be a citizen. He has cast his eyes along the vast 
and stately avenues of history. He has looked upon the 
fascinating fields which are opened up to the student of 
the physical and the biological sciences. He has made 
some progress in understanding those mathematical prin- 
ciples which are at the basis of all science. He has tried 
his wisdom teeth upon some of the problems of philosophy. 
He has secured at least a fleeting sense of the meaning 
of economics and all the social sciences. He has received 
at least a glimpse of that long and brilliant and tragic 
and glorious history which tells the tale of religion in 
the experience of man. He has listened to the singing 
beauty of some of the world’s great poetry and he has 
felt the clear lucidity and the elevated strength of some 


LIFE OF THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 107 


of the world’s great prose. He has learned to feel the 
mood of the mind of other nations as it expresses itself 
in their own tongue. And it is a happy thing if he has 
allowed the lofty sonorous strength of the Latin speech 
to enter into his own mind. 

At all events, now he has come to the place of parting 
with those steady disciplines which have been introducing 
him to man’s achievement in the realm of the mind. And 
unless he is planning to enter upon graduate work looking 
toward the Master’s or the Doctor’s degree or both or 
plans to enter some professional school, he has come to 
the place where he must himself be master of the steady 
discipline which is to keep his mind alive. We all know 
that a great many college graduates do not achieve a 
vigorous and growing mental life. If you made a map 
of their minds on the day of their graduation and another 
on the day of their death, you would not find that very 
much had happened in mental grapple or intellectual 
growth in the years between. For all practical purposes 
the day of intellectual senility began the day after gradua- 
tion. Now of course this sort of man may be ready to 
claim that life itself becomes his university, that while 
the specialised sort of culture represented by the college of 
liberal arts has a constantly smaller place in his thought, 
he is all the while moving forward in the realm of activity 
by means of which he secures his livelihood and feeling 
the inspiration of many quick and kindling minds. There 
is of course no doubt in the world that life itself is a 
university. But the man who ceases to be a reader the 
day he graduates from college and whose range of au- 
thentic and carefully classified knowledge about all the 
important matters of life becomes smaller every year can 
scarcely flatter himself that he is making the most out of 
the courses which this great university offers. Reading 
and disciplined thinking must go on through the years 
and they must keep pace with all the activities of life if 
a man is to be the best sort of man in his own line of 


108 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


work not to say a man of large and generous ranges of 
knowledge and appreciation. 

There : are four suggestions which I wish to make ran 
ing this matter of keeping the mind alive. There are four 
fields of reading and thinking which will yield very won- 
derful results if they are persistently followed through the 
years. 

The first is the field of history. The man who is to live 
fruitfully in any relation needs to know the history of 
man’s struggle and achievement in all the great lines of 
the human adventure. Mr. H. G. Wells may be a man 
whose technical scholarship is often open to grave ques- 
tion, but he has a very fertile mind and it is tremendously 
significant that he has almost an evangelical passion for 
the promotion for the study of history. If we know the 
whole human story we will be able to live together and 
work together and achieve together as is possible in no 
other way. We should all of us have volumes of history 
in process of perusal all the while. And every two or 
three years we should read some keen and graphic volume 
or series of volumes which quickly traverse the whole field 
of the human adventure. Mr. F. 8. Marvin’s “Living 
Past”? is a small volume. But the man who went over it 
carefully every few years would find the results surpris- 
ingly worth the effort. And the whole “Unity Series” of 
which Mr. Marvin is the editor is a veritable little univer- 
sity interpreting the present life of man in almost every 
field of his effort in the terms of his past experience. The 
history of particular centuries and the history of particu- 
lar sciences should come in for their turn of close reading. 
A man comes to have a new relation to any science when 
he knows its history. And incidentally the whole field 
becomes constantly not only more familiar but more 
fascinating. It is only the man at the beginning of his 
investigation who finds this sort of reading irksome. 

Then the college graduate should be a constant reader 
of the biographies of great and achieving men in every 
field of activity. Here his reading and his own life in 


LIFE OF THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 109 


the world of work come so close together that they really 
become one. The tale of the personal experiences of the 
great scientists, the great thinkers, the great seers, the 
great men of letters is a perpetual stimulus. It takes the 
whole field of learning out of the abstract and makes it 
splendidly concrete. The man who does not read half 
a dozen biographies every year is missing some of the 
most inspiring and fruitful experience which is within 
the range of the reader of books and indeed some of the 
most kindling influences which come to human life. Not 
to speak of the great old biographies, such a book as Hen- 
drick’s “Life and Letters of Walter Page” gives a man a 
new relation to some of the most important aspects of con- 
temporary life. And Sir Henry Jones’ “Old Memories” 
is a veritable treasure house of wholesome inspiration. 

Then the college graduate should be a perpetual reader 
of great prose and poetry. The singing music of our great 
poets should be ringing and echoing in his own mind. 
He must find his own contacts here. It may be that the 
wonderful subtle harmonies of Tennyson will capture his 
heart. It may be that the incessant intellectual curiosity 
and the athletic thinking and the robust confidence of 
Browning will master his mind. If he is wise, he will 
cultivate many poets and many writers of brilliant prose. 
Ruskin may open to him new splendours of experience or 
Matthew Arnold may teach him the noble meaning of 
the quality of literary restraint. Seers like Emerson and 
masters of quick shrewd insight like Samuel Crothers may 
deepen his insight and rouse his mind. The day will come 
when these things are a very part of his life. And he will 
listen not without sympathy if with critical caution to 
the masterful new voices of writers who with all their 
revolt have had many a glimpse of truth and beauty. 

The fourth field which will be full of reward for the 
man who enters upon it is that which sets about the inter- 
pretation of religion and especially of Christianity. The 
college graduate should have a knowledge of the Bible in 
which a critical understanding is combined with a pro- 


110 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


found moral and spiritual appreciation. Such books as 
Dr. Robert William Dale’s “Living Christ and the Four 
Gospels” or his massive work on “The Atonement” will 
bring untold riches to the reader. Even when you cannot 
agree with Dale, he leaves you with a richer and a deeper 
mind. David Smith’s “Days of His Flesh” and Dr. 
Glover’s “Jesus of History” give a new and inspiring 
approach to the one supremely creative life in all the 
world. There are no end of bright and yet careful popular 
books which bring Christianity home to the mind and 
heart. And as the years go by a man will reach out for 
that more difficult and demanding reading which though 
it exacts tribute from a man’s attention and thought 
makes him a veritable strong man in the matters of su- 
preme concern in human life. Professor Webb’s Lord 
Gifford lectures dealing with God and Personality and 
Divine Personality and Human Life may require an 
intellectual apprenticeship but they are worth all they 
cost. 

After all this suggestion we are likely to be met by a 
question which may seem to the man who lifts it as a very 
deadly attack upon the position we have been advocating. 
“How are busy practical men ever to find time for this 
sort of thing ?”? we are asked. The reply is that it is just 
busy practical men who can find time. The great London 
banker, Dr. Walter Leaf, is an illustration of something 
far more difficult than the thing which we have been 
suggesting, namely the achievement of world-wide renown 
as a scholar and great eminence as a man of finance. And 
in America Edmund Clarence Stedman illustrates the 
possibility of being a Wall Street broker and a man of 
letters. The truth is that a man can do better work in 
any particular field if he cultivates the sort of intellectual 
life which such reading as we have been discussing makes 
possible. And the further fact is the man who thinks he 
has least leisure time allows more time to pass by fruit- 
lessly than would be required by all the work we have in 
mind. If we have the right books all the while near us, 


LIFE OF THE COLLEGE GRADUATE Te 


if we turn to them the moment we have a bit of leisure, 
it is amazing the amount of material we may cover. 

To be sure, a man must think as well as read. And the 
books will open up manifold trails of thought. As the 
years go by he will prize time of quiet meditation more, 
and out of the richness of his well-stored mind he will 
bring the materials for long and productive thinking. 

Standing at the golden hour when the college enrolls 
your names among those honoured sons and daughters 
upon whom it has conferred its degrees, I charge the 
members of this graduating class to make it a matter of 
constant and faithful effort to read and think in such a 
fashion that the mind shall be kept alive, and by the help 
of God to live in such a fashion that the best they receive 
from reading and thinking shall be crystallized into 
character. 


XV 
THE MIND OF THE PREACHER 


Robert Browning had a way of throwing off trenchant 
little epigrams which stick in the mind like burrs. One of 
these embodies a bit of gay irony in which a speaker half 
parenthetically drops these words into the mind of his 
companion: “My stomach being as empty as your hat.” 
The shining little blade of sarcasm cuts its way into a 
theme of deep enough interest. What are we actually 
carrying about in our heads? Do we resemble that min- 
ister of whom an observant critic remarked: “He has 
brought everything to this community except a mind”? 
Or have we extorted from the relentless years those treas- 
ures of knowledge and those habits of thought and those 
powers of expression which enable a man to come to his 
parish lke a clipper ship of the old days with sails full 
of the favouring winds and a cargo rich and rare? The 
truth is that the minister has no more important task 
than that of being (to use Bishop McConnell’s fine phrase) 
a pastor of men’s minds. And if he is going to do this 
it is absolutely necessary that he should have a mind of 
his own. 

On this golden hour when a group of men stand at the 
end of their period of training in the divinity school it 
seems therefore a wise use of a little time of thought 
together to consider the mind of the preacher and the 
fashion in which it is to be made fit and kept fit for his 
great tasks. And as we approach this theme, I am not 
forgetting that I am addressing men whose own ecclesias- 
tical tradition includes the play of minds of such trans- 
cendent quality as that represented on this side of the 

112 


THE MIND OF THE PREACHER 113 


Atlantic by the resilient and creative thinking of Horace 
Bushnell and on the other side of the wide-lying sea by 
the masterful intellect of Robert William Dale. The 
Congregational minister has much to live up to. Free 
and brilliant thinking belong to the very genius of his 
type. 

At the very beginning I venture to remind the young 
men who are receiving their degrees in divinity today 
that the mind of the preacher must be the mind of a man. 
A very definite part of the secret of the power of such 
knightly ministers as Charles Sylvester Horne lay in the 
glowing human qualities which gave perpetual warmth 
and heartiness to all their thinking and to all their speech. 
That fine man of letters, Dr. William V. Kelley, has said 
of the most virile poet of the nineteenth century: ‘He 
reminds you of the face of a child looking out of the 
port-hole of a man-of-war.” Back of all the steel-ribbed 
strength, there is the wonder of the child’s eye. It is a 
doleful doctor’s gown above which you never see the merry 
laughing eyes of a happy boy. A keen critic said of Sir 
James Barrie that most men grow up into manhood but 
he grew down into a perpetual understanding of child- 
hood. The parallel to Kipling’s ‘‘walking with kings 
without losing the common touch” is the keeping of the 
red ripe heart of a man under the scholar’s gown. We 
have heard of erudite men who had read themselves into 
ignorance. And most of us have known men who have 
read themselves into dullness. It is not easy to win the 
capacity for brooding thought which belonged to Hamlet 
and to keep all the while that power of merry comradeship 
which belonged to Falstaff and Prince Hal. But at all 
costs the mind of the preacher must be kept gladly human 
and zestfully responsive to all the varied appeals of the 
human story as it unfolds before his eyes. There must 
always be a man back of the syllogism and a heart back 
of the process of dialectic and you must see the twinkle 
of friendly sympathetic eyes as you watch the scholar 
at his work. 


114 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


Then the mind of the preacher must be the mind of a 
student. Huis library is to be a place of friends more than 
a place of tools. And his study is to have all the happiness 
of a constant intellectual adventure. If the preacher 
does not discuss every problem which he touches with 
resources of ampler knowledge and wider perspective than 
his congregation bring to the consideration of the same 
matter, he cannot expect to speak with that stimulus and 
illumination and inspiration which he so desires to give 
to every public utterance. This means that he must be 
a citizen of the past, that he must have a mental map of 
the geography of man’s mind, that he must have an easy 
citizenship in the different centuries which have told the 
tale of the human adventure, that he must have an under- 
standing of the principles expressed in the various sciences 
and arts. He will be a man of detailed knowledge in 
some particular field. But he must live at the place where 
the departments meet. And without attempting a micro- 
scopic knowledge of vast fields, he must have a genuine 
apprehension of the significance and the relations of the 
varied aspects of human thought and activity. He must 
be a perpetual reader of history and biography. He must 
feel the pulse of every age and sense the distinct quality 
of its life. So at last he will come to the place where he 
can see the age with the eyes of the ages. Whatever the 
charm of his personality and whatever the bright splen- 
dour of his earnestness the sermons of a preacher will 
wear very thin at last if he is not a man of genuine and 
of perpetually growing erudition. If his own intellectual 
life is a constant adventure of happy study, if he has 
learned to be a student for whom books drip with vitality, 
if he lives in books with the same hilarious zest which 
he brings to his best hours of living with men, his preach- 
ing will be full of electric energy as long as he has enough 
physical vitality to ascend a pulpit. The wedlock between 
a preacher and his study is no temporary experiment. It 
is not a question of three weeks or even of three years. 


THE MIND OF THE PREACHER 115 


“Until death us do part” the great vow reads. And there 
must be no question of a divorce. . 

The mind of the preacher must also be the mind of a 
cosmopolitan. He can echo the fine old words of the Latin 
poet Terence: ‘All that concerns humanity is of interest 
to me.”’ He can echo the words which a man of world- 
wide sympathy once put above his door: “Every land is 
my fatherland.” He must never be contented with know- 
ing any great thing from without. He must have that 
sort of vicarious sympathy which enables him to know it 
from within. He must have the capacity to understand 
the tremendous appeal of the idea of solidarity to the 
members of the Latin church. He must understand the 
appeal of a lovely and gracious ritual to men to whom 
holiness ever speaks in the terms of deathless beauty. He 
must understand that tradition of fearless independence 
which enfranchises the mind of man and sets it upon 
lonely quests of individual search for truth. He must 
understand the glowing evangelism of that piety which 
flaming with the wonder of a mystical inner experience 
goes out to make its vision splendid the possession of the 
world. He must understand that eagerness for efficient 
activity which has produced the great organisers of the 
Christian church and the types of highly articulated eccle- 
siastical organisation. But his cosmopolitan interest must 
take loftier wing. Not merely as an interpreter of 
churches but as a human being he must sense the meaning 
of the life of the varied racial groups as it unfolds in 
their own experience. The grace and the indirection of 
the Latin type, the depth and the rich melancholy of the 
Slav, the quick straight thrust of the Anglo-Saxon mind, 
the long tradition of fine urbanity which has made some 
of the yellow men stand among the finest gentlemen of 
the world, the love of action of the West, the brooking 
contemplation of the East, these and much more must 
live in the thoughts of the man who can only preach a 
cosmopolitan gospel if he has a cosmopolitan mind. “O 
God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee,” cried Kepler. 


116 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


“Q Humanity, I think thy thoughts after thee,’ must be 
the cry of the preacher who would really be a pastor of 
men’s minds. 

The mind of the preacher should also be the mind of 
a man of letters. This does not mean that every minister 
should attempt to learn the secrets of the grand style. It 
does not mean that preachers should become self-conscious 
in their sense of literary finish. It does mean that every 
preacher should know how precious is the treasure which 
comes to us in our good old English speech. He should 
feel the power of its short crisp words and the sword-play 
of its clean and biting sentences. He should feel the long 
and reverberating splendour of those echoing sentences 
whose many-syllabled stateliness captures the very atmos- 
phere of regal magnificence. He should know the power 
of those quick and telling epigrams when speech becomes 
almost acrobatic in celerity and power. He should know 
the simple and firm clarity of that speech which sets forth 
thought in so sharp an outline that it is quite impossible 
that it should be misunderstood. He should bear in his own 
mind the music of the writing of those masters who have 
made words their slaves and sentences their bond-servants. 
And then with his mind full of this wonder of potent 
speech he should write his own convictions knowing that 
the company he has kept will tell its own story of gracious 
and noble expression and inspire its own qualities of 
original and effective speech. 

And now we are coming to the heart of the matter. For 
next we must say that the mind of the preacher should be 
the mind of a Christian. The strategy of the message 
which speaks in the literature of the Old Testament and 
the New lies partly in its power to create a certain kind 
of mind. Principal Sir George Adam Smith has said 
that the Old Testament gives conscience new ears and new 
eyes. This is surely true of the great prophets. It is 
surely true of the moral and spiritual insight of the noblest 
of the Psalms. It is true of that human story which rises 
from the varied books which make-up the Old Testament 


THE MIND OF THE PREACHER vale 


literature. But it is preeminently in that wonder of new 
life among men which is such a singing brightness in the 
experiences reflected in the New Testament that we find 
these the creative centre for the making of the Christian 
mind. The one stainless and winsome and regal life, the 
full richness of its quality, the passionate love of its sacri- 
fice, the sudden sense that we need know no more of God 
than we see in the face of Christ, the apprehension that 
the character of God in action meets us in his life and 
death: all these release new potencies even as they summon 
new powers in our own lives. The unfolding of all this 
as the experience of passionately eager men like Paul who 
were ready to break any chain to make the new life articu- 
late and potent, the appropriation of the moral and spir- 
itual energy which flows like a quickening stream from 
the life which the New Testament reflects: all this tells 
the story of the fashion in which the mind of the preacher 
begins to become a Christian mind. It will require years 
to work out all of its implications. There will be many 
a bright inspiration from history and from biography and 
from living men. But the moment the one Great Person- 
ality comes to the throne room of the soul of the preacher 
the defining experience of his life is well on its way. 
And last of all the mind of the preacher must be the 
mind of a prophet. He must see that New life which 
the Lord Christ has released in the world in the terms 
of a new individual and a new society. The two are per- 
petually playing in and out of each other. You cannot 
have the new society without the new individual. And 
you cannot have the new individual in any sort of com- 
pleteness except in the terms of the new society. The 
mind of the preacher becomes possessed of a commanding 
vision of life made organic. He knows the tragedy of 
an inorganic individual. He knows the tragedy of an 
inorganic world. And he believes that the secret of mak- 
ing all life organic is found in that royal religion which 
moved out upon the world from the mind and heart of 
, Christ. The final moment in the making of the mind of 


118 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


the preacher is the moment when the sense of inner com- 
pulsion becomes overwhelmingly authentic and mastering. 
It is with the sense that the Universe is on his side, that 
God is on his side, that the very vital energies of the 
world are moving in his speech that he stands in his pulpit. 
It is this consciousness of a divine afflatus which gives 
the last quality of potency to the preacher’s utterance. 

To be sure, gifts vary and ways of placing the emphasis 
are different enough. The infinite variety of preachers 
and the infinite variety in preaching is a great and glorious 
thing. But each in his own fashion, the men who go out 
to the high adventures of the pulpit, must see to it that 
the mind keeps its human zest, that it is enriched by a 
hfe of study, that it glows with cosmopolitan understand- 
ing, that it becomes articulate in language disciplined by 
a knowledge of some of the best that has been said and 
written in our venerable and majestic speech, that it is 
completely saturated by the motives and the energies 
which come from the personality of Jesus Christ, and 
that upon its altars, the fires of a great communion set 
glowing the passionate purposes of prophecy. None of 
us are great enough for these things. None of us can be 
contented without them. 


XVI 
PRAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY 


Mr. President, Fathers and Brethren: 

The angels ‘of the churches have greatly increased in 
number since the brave days when the first chapters of 
the New Testament Apocalypse were written. They look 
out on far-lying territories and they see the mobilisation 
of the Christian forces in many lands. And since the days 
when sailors first moved through the Strait of Belle Isle 
and the days when daring explorers first passed beyond 
the Rockies and listened to the breakers of the western 
sea your own potential country has not only become a 
mighty commonwealth, a free empire in the new world, 
but it has also become a land of commanding Christian 
forces. The angels of its churches have looked upon num- 
berless valiant deeds. They have witnessed the growth 
of Christian character and the impact of vast Christian 
energies upon the life of the whole land. It is saying the 
truth modestly to declare that Methodism has had its 
own commanding share in the Christian achievement in 
Canada, and to-night it gives me great joy speaking for 
four million Methodists across the invisible line which 
separates your great commonwealth from our own, to bring 
greetings all glowing with eager friendship, with pride in 
your achievement, and with glad expectation for your 
future. 

It is a great happiness for me, as a citizen of the United 
States of America, to stand to-night in this great and free 
Dominion of the British commonwealth. The two peoples 
share the glory of a common Anglo-Saxon tradition and 
the hopes of a common ideal of democracy. Our dearest 


119 


120 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


political traditions go back to that motherland of modern 
political freedom where the people wrought out the con- 
stitutions of parliamentary democracy. We are not at 
all willing to admit that our life begins with the year 
1776. The very latest date which we are willing to accept 
as a mark of the beginning of our tradition is that great 
year we share with you—1215, when the Magna Charta 
was signed—and we have a shrewd suspicion that our 
beginning les much farther back in the very roots of 
English civilisation in the world. At all events the long 
struggle for parliamentary control in England is incor- 
porated in our own tradition and the fountains of our 
liberty are the very fountains from which you drink. We 
have an intellectual tradition which we share in common. 
The bright and piercing eyes of Don Chaucer have quick- 
ened the observation of our young men, the imperial brain 
of Shakespeare, in which every human type found a home, 
has given us a new intellectual citizenship, the royal dig- 
nity of Milton’s prose and the long reverberating music 
of his stately verse have given us a new sense of the dignity 
of our good old English speech and the loftiness of the 
principles to which it can give noble and commanding 
expression. The chastity and restraint of Matthew Arnold, 
the haunting melodiousness of Tennyson’s verse, the depth 
and range and grasp of the mind of Browning, the moral 
passion of Carlyle, the love of ethical beauty which burns 
in the writings of Ruskin: all this and much more is ours 
even as it is yours. The Anglo-Saxon heritage has made 
kings of us all. 

It is also a great happiness for me to stand here tonight 
because we are all sharers in another gracious heritage. 
We have in common the American tradition. A few years 
ago a distinguished publicist of the Dominion of Canada 
delivered a series of lectures at a commanding American) 
university on the theme “The American Idea.” I believe 
that he was right in asserting that out of our experiment 
of living in Canada and in the United States a certain 
spirit and a certain point of view have come into being 


PRAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY 121 


which we may indeed describe as the American Idea. 
And you and I receive that as a common inheritance. We 
do not forget—he did not forget—how much we owe, 
even in things which we have come to regard as distinctly 
American to battles fought and to victories won while 
America was still hidden beyond the mystery of the tossing 
Atlantic. But it is not too much to say that our applica- 
tion of the principles of freedom and _ self-government 
have given to us a spirit and a mood about life which 
are all our own. We have our own problems and our own 
terribly significant struggles. We are tempted to be over- 
confident, we are likely to set all too small value upon 
those gracious urbanities which are the fruit of a ripe 
and mature civilisation, we are tempted to value things 
more than we value ideals, and property more than ideas, 
and to fall down and worship our own material prosperity. 
But for all that, on this side of the sea there has come to 
be a new and wholesome sense of the value of every man 
just because he is a man, a new fearlessness and a new 
unhesitating directness of thought about many things, 
where the smothering influence of ancient custom has 
made directness difficult. A new belief in the future has 
been born on this side of the sea. A new belief in hu- 
manity has grown up in Canada and the United States. 
In your great Dominion and in our Republic humanity 
has tasted of a fountain which has made its spirit young 
again. And we share in this happy renaissance of the 
spirit of man. The American tradition has made optimists 
of us all. 

There is another matter which is a source of deep glad- 
ness to me tonight. And that has to do with another 
heritage which we hold together. The Methodist tradition 
is our common treasure, our common responsibility and 
our common hope. That urbane eighteenth century with 
so polished a surface and so tragic a moral decay at the 
heart of it saw the planting of the seeds of a new moral 
and spiritual life all over the English-speaking world. 
That precise little Oxford scholar “with a genius for 


122 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


government not inferior to that of Richelieu” found one 
England and left another. Religion was born anew as 
Mr. Wesley and his captains carried on their mighty 
advance in the name of a victorious experience of the 
Christian life. And men like Francis Asbury and the 
other apostles of the saddle-bags baptising infant villages 
in the name of vital piety, all over the lands which have 
become your Dominion and our Republic, put new moral 
and spiritual fibre into the life of both lands. They 
changed a world of rude battling with the forces of nature 
in America, and a world of polite cynicism in England, 
into a world with the light of the eternal shining in its 
eyes and the passionate consciousness of the presence of 
God taking a new place of command in its conduct. 

To be sure, we glad admit that we owe much to many 
a stately and noble ecclesiastical tradition. The haunting 
sense of solidarity has been put forever in the heart of 
Christendom by the Latin Church. The inspiration of 
a great belief in the humanity lifted into a finer meaning 
by the Incarnation has moved in and out of the conscious- 
ness of many an age from the Greek Church of the first 
centuries. The Lutheran Church of the Reformation 
lifted the sense of the right of the individual spirit to a 
personal contact with the living God into a place of em- 
phasis which can never be forgotten. The Reformed 
Churches have made memorable and commanding the 
emphasis upon the righteous will of God. And they have 
claimed the logical faculty as a bond-servant of the King- 
dom of God. The Anglican tradition has brought a 
gracious loveliness into the expression of the religious life 
in many a land. The Independent tradition has stood 
for a noble intellectuality and for a stalwart freedom. 
And many of the movements of protest which we feel to 
have missed central meanings of the Catholic faith have 
proven right in their assertions if they have been wrong 
in their denials. Gladly do we open our arms to hold 
the golden harvest of wisdom offered to us by the Church 


PRAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY 123 


universal. It is a great treasure. And we receive it with 
humble joy. 

And even as we open our hearts to this spirit of catholic 
appreciation there comes a deep consciousness that our own 
characteristic experience of religion and our own type of 
life have a significance and involve a responsibility which 
we must not ignore. The Methodist experience and prac- 
tice of religion has far-reaching implications for us and 
for that universal Church from which we have received 
so much. If one desires a phrase in which to describe 
the contribution of Methodism to the Christian life of 
the world he may speak of the emphasis upon pragmatic 
Christianity. The mightiest sanction in Methodism is 
Christian experience. Everything else is seen in its light. 
Everything is appraised under its beneficent influence. 
From the time when John Wesley’s heart was “strangely 
warmed” until today the pragmatic test has been the 
Methodist criterion. 

May we ask ourselves then the question which has to 
do with the place of Pragmatic Christianity in the future 
of religion? In doing so we shall be also asking the ques- 
tion which has to do with the contribution of Methodism 
to the present and the future. I want to venture the asser- 
tion that there are some great human quests which can 
only be pursued successfully under the guidance of a 
pragmatic Christianity. And in following this claim I 
believe we may see the highways of most strategic service 
for our people in the testing days which lhe before us. 

1.—The most significant of all human ways of searching 
is the quest for God. The story of man’s strange adven- 
ture in the world is full of it. Every religion is poignant 
with the pain and passion and wistful hope of it. Men 
have sought for God in ritual. They have sought for Him 
in ascetic self-mutilation. They have sought to meet Him 
in submission to the behests of a Church. ‘They have 
sought to find Him in stern obedience to demanding codes. 
They have sought Him in the speculations of the mind. 
They have sought Him in the majesty of nature and the 


124 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


exquisite beauty of art. And no earnest seeker, one dares 
to believe, has returned without some bit of gold. But 
there has been deep weariness. There has been sad dis- 
illusionment. And the way of permanent and triumphant 
security in fellowship with God has been missed by multi- 
tudes. It is not too much to say that that direct and 
mastering experience of the eternal love of God in the 
soul of man upon which Methodism built its every sanction 
is the only path which offers full and growing satisfaction 
to the passionately hungry spirit of man. To be sure, this 
experience has by no means been confined to Methodism 
but it has been the happiness of the Methodist people to 
put this experience in a place of unique emphasis and to 
keep it at the heart of their interpretation and experience | 
of religion. The God whom one has met in a personal 
experience of the forgiveness and grace of Christ has 
much to say to the mind and to the active conscience and 
to the sense of beauty. But all this utterance is under- 
stood at last in the light of the glorious hour of meeting, 
when God and the human spirit entered into personal 
fellowship. The way for us all in this difficult age is 
through that audience room of the spirit where we meet 
the Master of Life in the luminous glory of a personal 
deliverance. It is a pragmatic Christianity which answers 
fully the passionate need which drives men to the quest 
for God. 

2.—The quest for God is itself a part of another journey — 
of searching which the human spirit can by no means 
avoid. That is the quest for certainty. The desire for 
something sure and stable in this changing world is one 
of the structural desires in human life. It emerges as a 
mental demand in the Eleatic philosophy centuries before 
the coming of Christ. It is a haunting desire back of 
much of the restlessness of this distraught and bewildered 
age. From Heraclitus to Bergson there have been thinkers 
who were prophets of the instability of things. But even 
they, if they were to be saved from utter incoherency, 
needed something permanent at the basis of all that was 


PRAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY 125 


mutable. And even when most adventurous the mind of 
man is driven back to the desire for security in some 
abiding certainty which can be depended upon in the 
midst of all the flux of things. Men have tried to find 
certainty in an infallible Church. And the Church has 
become a tyrant of contradictory moods. They have tried 
to find certainty in a mechanically infallible book. But 
the Bible loses its soul the moment you attempt to turn 
it into a book of mathematical rules. They have tried 
to find certainty in their own natures. But the kaleido- 
scope within has offered no secure and steady place of 
rest. It is when the soul of man meets the life of God in 
all the wonder of a personal experience of religion that 
a basis of certainty is really found. There is no apolo- 
getic like the simple words: “‘Whereas I was blind now 
I see.” The Church has its contribution to make as it 
brings a man into the atmosphere of vital piety. The 
Bible becomes indeed God’s messenger as it speaks not 
of mechanical rules, but of the life of God in the soul of 
man. ‘The voice of human nature itself responds when 
the mastery of divine life has reached its deepest depths. 
But the deciding matter is just the mighty contact of the 
human personality with the divine life. It is a growing 
and deepening experience as the years go by. It is to be 
guided and developed by the play upon it of all the other 
lives renewed by the same experience. But it remains true 
that the central and defining matter in the finding of 
certainty is just the meeting in vital experience of the 
upreach of man’s need and the downreach of God’s trans- 
forming love. Pragmatic Christianity brings satisfaction 
to man’s quest for certainty. 

3.—In men who come to understanding of their own 
nature the quest for God and the quest for certainty sooner 
or later come to be involved in the quest for an organic 
life. For the very disconcerting thing about the indi- 
vidual man is just his incapacity to organise all the forces 
of his life into noble unity, and so to make possible a 
really harmonious character. Robert Louis Stevenson put 


126 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


it all too simply when he spoke of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde. Life would not be so terribly difficult if there were 
only two of each of us. With more insight but with a 
curiously mixed bit of mathematics, Matthew Arnold 
wrote: 


“Each strives nor knows for what he strives, 
And each half lives a hundred different lives.” 


As a matter of fact there is a whole community of each 
of us. They have the most contradictory likes and dis- 
likes. They want the strangest and the most different sorts 
of things. Whole armies of them march and counter- 
march upon the arena of our inner life. And really that 
is too promising a figure. For a good deal of the time 
they are fighting each other in hopeless confusion. The 
battle for an organic life is the fundamental fight for 
every man. And the quest for a purpose noble enough, 
for a devotion great and high enough to master and bend 
about it all the forces of our life is one of the ultimate 
quests of the individual in the world. Here again the 
golden word is said by that type of religion whose appeal 
centres in a personal experience of the love of God as it 
speaks to us from the Cross and as it grows in us through 
the fellowship of the living Christ. When a man puts the 
living Master in the place of selfish desire in his own heart 
the great decisive experience of life has come to him. Now 
he is ready for all sorts of large and far-reaching tasks. 
For only an organic life can work with the noblest efi- 
ciency about the great matters of the world. And here 
again a pragmatic Christianity has the message which is 
needed by our time. 

4.—The quest for an organic life on the part of the 
individual is not the end. It is only the beginning. It 
is inevitable that the man with the new life shall begin 
to think of the new brotherhood. It is inevitable that 
he shall enter upon the quest for an organic society. Men 
have sought for an organic society in a good many ways. 
Karl Marx thought it could be produced along economic 
lines and wrote “Das Capital” to make plain the way. 


PRAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY 127 


Men have been ready to call in the most varied forces for 
the making of that better social order of which they have 
dreamed. One ventures to believe that no society can be 
better than the individual men who compose it. And 
therefore the individual whose own life has been made 
organic by the grace of God will always be the pivotal 
man in the making of the organic society. But there is 
more to be said. The very experience of the love of Christ 
which sets going the processes which make the individual 
life organic, also sets in motion all the forces which make 
for brotherhood. The very experience which gives a man 
peace in his own soul makes him a brother of other men. 
And Christian experience itself is a social thing. It is 
not in isolation, but in the gladness of brotherly living 
that men enter upon the great riches of Christian experi- 
ence. And so it comes to pass that the personal appropria- 
tion of the love of God as it speaks to us through our 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, is the very method by 
which an individual becomes a social man equipped to 
have his share in the producing of an organic society. 
Whenever your men of social passion are without this 
mighty personal dynamic, they lack an essential part of 
the power they need for their task. And the man with 
a deep and rich personal experience of the love of God 
can only keep its shining clarity if he puts it to work upon 
social tasks. Social passion without mysticism is a body 
without a soul. And a deep and rich experience of the 
things of God in the soul without social expression 1s at 
best a ghost without a body, wandering forlorn about the 
waste places of the earth. Pragmatic Christianity is to 
give wings to the social passion. And so at last the organic 
society is to be produced. 

5.—All the while the men who are most deeply respon- 
sive to the great moral and spiritual appeals of life will 
be haunted by a great desire. And this desire will set 
them upon another way of searching. It will lead to 
the quest for a living Church. It is easy to manufacture 
ecclesiastical machinery. It is not easy to be sure that 


128 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


the presence of the living creature is in the wheels. There 
are no end of things we should like for the Church. The 
one great essential is that it shall be alive with the life of 
God. All the augustness of its tradition and all the 
noble beauty of its form of worship will count for little 
if the breath of life is not in it. And here again there 
is one secret of potency. Some have thought to find it in 
the union of existing communions. And no doubt any 
union which is the expression of noble moral purpose and 
of great spiritual passion will have great significance. 
But more union does not mean new power. The union 
of two dead churches would only mean the presence of 
a larger ecclesiastical corpse. ‘The great matter is the 
securing of life. And when you have the presence of the 
very life of Christ in the soul of the Church you will 
have the heart of unity even when there is no ecclesiastical 
bond. You can never secure life by even the most noble 
kinds of ecclesiastical manipulation. The life which is 
to renew the body of Christ must come from a new and 
deep appropriation of all that He offers to the soul of man. 
Once more the fountains of the living presence must play 
in the heart of every Christian. And this inner inspira- 
tion must be given adequate expression in relation to all 
the concrete problems which we face. Where there is a 
group of living Christians accepting the tasks God sets 
before them there is always the living Church. And so 
pragmatic Christianity facing with candour and passion 
the tasks of the actual world of to-day will show us the 
way to the living Church. And as we follow the guidance 
of the corporate life of the spirit we shall find a new unity 
coming to the Church of Christ throughout the world. 
6.—It is inevitable that every area of life shall at last 
be claimed for the rule of the living Christ. And so 
sooner or later the body of Christians in the world must 
set out upon the quest for ethical beauty. All that is 
lovely belongs at last to the Church of God. The quest 
of loveliness is a really Christian quest. Indeed it is only 
as it is guided by the spirit of Christ that the quest for 


PRAGMATIC CHRISTIANITY 129 


beauty is saved from grave and fearful dangers. The 
study of the Renaissance in Italy reminds us vividly 
enough how poisonous a thing the love of beauty may 
become if it is not mastered by the passion for noble and 
pure living. It is only when beauty is wedded to good- 
ness that it is safe. And it is only when goodness is 
wedded to beauty that it is saved completely for a certain 
hard angularity which sometimes characterises the expres- 
sion of the best of motives. All the rich and glowing 
meaning of this wonderful world is to be captured and 
interpreted in the terms of that moral and spiritual love- 
liness which is at the very heart of the Christian religion. 
And here again it is a personal vision of the majestic 
presence of the living Christ which is to be the guide to 
all beauty, even as it is the way to all goodness. Prag- 
matic Christianity is to lift the whole realm of aesthetics 
into the glory of the Kingdom of God. 

7.—There is another quest which has appeared before 
the mind of our age as a matter of great desire. We saw 
the golden gleams for a moment. We thought we were 
ready to set out upon the great adventure. But now clouds 
and darkness seem to be all about. Yet the quest must 
be undertaken. If we are confused for a moment we must 
arise with renewed understanding and continue the strug- 
gle. We cannot forego the quest for an organic world. 
International relations must come to be dominated by the 
mind of Christ or (to paraphrase a phrase I once heard 
Lord Robert Cecil use in the House of Commons) we must 
go back to the politics of the jungle. If we attempt to 
exclude any set of relationships from the rule of Christ, 
that very evasion will make it impossible for Him to rule 
completely in any set of relationships among men. So 
by a necessity which inheres in the very nature of the 
Christian religion we must hope and pray and work for 
an organic world. And here again at last the whole matter 
rests upon multiplying the number of men and women 
with a living experience of the things of God, ready to 
think the thoughts of Christ after Him and to do His 


130 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


will in all the avenues of the life of the world. A genuine 
Christian experience makes inevitable the missionary 
enterprise. And just as surely it makes inevitable the 

ultimate battle of mankind, the battle for the enthroning 
of Christ in the whole field of international relationships. 
We are left dizzy by the magnitude of the task. All the 
more we are driven back to those sources of inspiration 
which come from the personal fellowship of the Christian 
with his Lord. A Christian experience perpetually alive 
is the inspiration which will carry men to the end of the 
great endeavour. Pragmatic Christianity is to give us 
the capacity to create an organic world. 

If all these things are true, we may say, very humbly 
and with a profound sense of responsibility, that the 
very history and character of Methodism gives it a place 
of strategy in all the essential matters which confront the 
world today. Without self-consciousness and with devout 
gladness for all the great words to be uttered by all the 
Churches we may know that God has given us a living 
word for this great hour. The emphasis upon Christian 
experience sets all the fountains of vitality playing in the 
Church and in the world. Pragmatic Christianity belongs 
to all the Churches. And it is to be theirs and ours all 
the more completely because we take most seriously our 
responsibility in respect of its dissemination. So with 
good heart we may go forth to do our work in the world. 


XVII 
MAKING THE WORLD OUR CITY 


“The world is mine.” Psalm 50: 12. 


These words do not at once suggest the fiftieth Psalm. 
They take our minds to one of the dramatic scenes in that 
fascinating novel, “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alex- 
andre Dumas. Edmond Dantes has just discovered a vast 
treasure and is filled with a sense of the wonderful possi- 
bilities which its possession will open up before him. He 
climbs to a great height and in tremendous exuberance of 
spirit cries out “The world is mine.” It is a different 
enough connotation which the same words bear in that 
noble poem which we characterise as the fiftieth Psalm. 
The poet is full of the wonder of a vivid and lofty con- 
ception of God, a God who desires character more than 
he desires sacrifice on the part of his worshippers. The 
crass futility of a worship which begins and ends in ma- 
terial gifts moves with grim irony through his mind. “I 
do not ask you for things. The whole world is mine 
already.” And so those seminal words leap forth. “The 
world is mine.” They have a curiously haunting quality. 
They seem to suggest opening doors and awaiting oppor- 
tunities. And like the character of Dumas we are inclined 
to find a fashion in which we can make them our words 
even as the writer of the Old Testament poem made them 
the words of God. 

John Galsworthy’s play “Loyalties” has stirred and 
quickened the minds of those who have witnessed its pro- 
duction in a curiously effective fashion. Here we see 
the mutual contention of numerous loyalties each having 

fate ih 131 


132 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


a certain fine value of its own and yet plunged into the 
clenched antagonism of mutual hostility. And in spite 
of all these fine loyalties, indeed in a measure because of 
them, everything is becoming more terribly and tragically 
confused all the while. We are more than ready for the 
suggestion which falls from the lips of one character that 
there must be a more inclusive loyalty in which smaller 
loyalties can find a way of friendly harmony. Nearly 
every tragedy of our contemporary life, so capable of small 
loyalties, and so perplexed in the presence of the demand 
for a great and inclusive loyalty, is symbolised in Mr. 
Galsworthy’s study of contending faithfulnesses which 
never rise to the height of a noble and unifying faith. 
The truth is that unless we find a great and inclusive 
and harmonising loyalty we are upon a way which will 
lead us to darker and deeper tragedy all the while. If 
different people are perpetually loyal to different bits of 
the world they will constantly be hurling themselves at 
each other in the name of these fragmentary loyalties, and 
so they will bring about the disintegration of civilisation 
itself. It is in precisely this sense that we need to say 
“The world and not simply a part of the world is mine.” 
When we all make the whole world our city, civilisation 
will be safe. And this is the meaning which that fine old- 
world cosmopolitan is to attain in our period of the human 
experiment. You have a wonderful flash of insight. into 
the nature of this principle in the words of Jesus, here 
again spoken of God rather than of man, “‘God loved the 
world.” It is when we think of the whole world as the 
object of God’s profound devotion and passionate regard 
that we are able to come to a new apprehension of the 
attitude which men ought to take toward this same world. 
When our sympathy is large enough to include the world, 
when our understanding is deep enough to include the 
world, when our character is fine enough to serve the 
world, then indeed we can say ‘The world is mine.” 
There is one world in which, quite in spite of ourselves, 
we have been driven to rise from the provincial and the 


MAKING THE WORLD OUR CITY 133 


fragmentary to a higher unity. This is the world of 
science. In a measure the process has been going on for 
a very long time. Even in the ancient world it was not 
possible to have one sort of mathematics for one nation 
and another variety for its neighbour, though the men of 
one nation might have a completer insight into the nature 
of mathematical principles than another. There was not 
a Greek science of numbers which was quite different 
from the Latin science of numbers. It was early seen 
that scientific truth is a unity. And the unbelievable 
advances of science in the century behind us have simply 
confirmed this position. We do not have one chemistry 
in England and another in France and one biology in 
Europe and another in Asia. We use different languages 
to express the same scientific truths. But it is only the 
wrapping which is different. We are dealing with the 
same facts and the same principles and the same reactions 
in spite of our differences of speech. Indeed the meetings 
of the international scientific societies constitute one of 
the most promising indications of a movement toward 
world unity. The men of science of all lands have risen 
from the fragmentary view to the larger unity. And as 
they advance together each may say in his own tongue: 
“The world is mine.” 

The situation is not quite so happy when the whole 
range of the intellectual life of man comes into view. 
Here we come upon the tendency to be contented with 
some noble fragment rather than to seek the larger unity 
of the whole. Indeed we must admit that the exponents 
of the physical and biological sciences have sometimes 
hesitated about including in their circle of ideas those 
humanistic disciplines which moved beyond the realms 
of those fields in which their interests centred. With 
the increasing specialisation of modern investigation the 
production of the type of mind which is a citizen of the 
whole intellectual world becomes more difficult. And the 
provincial expert who has definite knowledge in a very 
small field and no apprehension of larger relationships, 


134 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


has become a problem if not a menace in our academic 
life. So we have the emerging of those contending small 
loyalties which must somehow be transcended by a more 
inclusive view and a larger synthesis. In the intellectual 
life a man is only safe when he can say: “The world is 
mine.” ‘This does not mean, of course, that everybody is 
to know everything. It does mean that at the very moment 
when a man is bringing his contribution in a particular 
part of a particular field he is to be cultivating a spirit 
which dwells where the departments meet. He may be a 
sort of intellectual plummer. But that offers no reason 
why he should not have a genuine appreciation of the 
whole edifice as a completed structure. 

Difficulties begin to bristle when we approach the prob- 
lem of the races. Here fragmentary loyalties fairly run 
riot. The colour scheme of the world is a part of the 
world’s most terrible tragedy. If you lift the question 
as to whether a man’s most fundamental loyalty is to a 
particular race or to humanity you have raised a matter 
which searches the motives of men’s souls. The dominance 
of the white race has been a most interesting and signifi- 
cant aspect of the great human experiment. But already 
the most expert knowledge of science, especially of military 
science, has passed beyond the borders of the white race. 
And we are beginning to see that we must either learn 
a method of inter-racial cooperation or face the tragedy 
of a racial war. In the United States the Ku Klux Klan 
and the anti-Semitic movement have assumed proportions 
which may well cause a careful inspection of our national 
ideals. And out over the world the racial problem assumes 
ever-increasing importance. The forces of good will are 
endeavouring to show us a way by means of which each 
race may find a full and noble life without exploitation 
and without tyranny. The exponents of this endeavour 
are giving a new meaning to the words: “The world is 
mine.” ‘The world is mine as an opportunity for uni- 
versal sympathy and universal understanding and univer- 
sal cooperation. So we are given an opportunity to 


MAKING THE WORLD OUR CITY 135 


transcend another group of fragmentary loyalties and 
become in a deep and true fashion cosmopolitan. 

Historically the problem has taken a form which has 
been characterised by great difficulty in what we may call 
the geographical world. The love of one land has often 
meant the hatred of other lands. The devotion to one 
land has sometimes meant the exploitation of other lands. 
As Madame Roland cried “Oh, liberty, what crimes have 
been committed in thy name,” so many students have been 
inclined to ery, “Oh, Patriotism, what crimes have been 
committed in thy name.” Fortunately we have made 
much progress in this regard. The meeting of tariffs 
every few miles on the Rhine in the Middle Ages reads 
now like a troubled dream. We are learning that it is 
in cooperation as friends rather than as in hostility as 
foes that the land of the world can each come to its fullest 
and most prosperous life. International commerce has 
helped greatly to enlarge our outlook in this regard. But 
we have not entirely learned the meaning of the principle 
that what is bad for one part of the world is never for 
the permanent good of any other part. So here, too, we 
need to see that the truest love of any land is a devotion 
to that land as a means of increasing the good of the whole 
world. True patriotism is the ally and not the foe of the 
cosmopolitan spirit. So the eager patriot can in his own 
fashion say ‘‘The world is mine.” 

That type of experience which we may characterise as 
the moral world has suffered from fragmentary loyalties. 
An ethic of self-denial alone depletes the life of the race. 
An ethic of self-assertion alone produces a_ heartless 
tyranny. And this is only one illustration of the fashion 
in which we need to rise to inclusive ethical views. It 
is in the larger outlook that we find the inspiration for 
a full ethical life. We need the insights of all the moral 
teachers of the race mutually supplementing and checking 
each other for the production of the noblest moral hfe. 
Here, too, we may say ‘“‘The world is mine.” 

It is nowhere more true than in the realm of religion 


136 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


that we need to rise from the fragmentary loyalty to the 
larger devotion. One church emphasises the freedom of 
the individual. Another church represents the power 
of a great solidarity. Now the one emphasis carried to 
an extreme would produce anarchy. The other carried 
to an extreme would produce tyranny. We need each 
principle and as they flow together we are saved from 
the dangers which characterise either when alone. Here 
is a church which emphasises the emotions and here is 
another which emphasises the intellect. We need both 
points of view. The emotional life alone is an over- 
luxuriant growth. The intellectual life alone becomes 
hard and rigid. Thought and feeling together, thought 
warmed by feeling and feeling disciplined by thought 
make the full and stable life. We must claim the insights 
of all the ecclesiastical groups. We must claim that 
worship which is full of a rapturous sense of the loveliness 
of ordered worship and gracious ritual. We must claim 
that worship which glows with the spontaneous freedom 
of the kindled individual spirit. In this realm, too, we 
must say “The world is mine.” 

Indeed it is not too much to say that every great religion 
has something to teach us. Religion in the West tended 
to become action. It inclined to emphasise the will. 
Religion in the East tended to become brooding contem- 
plation. It inclined to emphasise mystical insight. And 
we can see that we need both approaches and both expres- 
sions of the religious life. The larger loyalty will welcome 
truth from every realm of the experience of man as he 
adventures forth in search of contact with the Master of 
Life. 

When we return with this principle of the larger loy- 
alty, of making the whole world our city, to the Christian 
religion we are happy to find that its founder himself 
represented this very insight in thought and speech and 
action. Whenever we transcend small loyalties in the 
name of larger devotions we find that the teaching and 
the spirit of Jesus support us. It is this which gives to 


MAKING THE WORLD OUR CITY 137 


the Christian religion such an immediate appeal to such 
manifold types. The spirit of world-wide good will and 
the spirit of world-wide citizenship is the very spirit of 
the Man of Galilee. It is not as an exploiter of the 
world but as servants of the world that His followers in 
His own spirit may declare ““The world is mine.” 

The quest for the higher unity is the noblest human 
quest. The search for the larger loyalty is the most prom- 
ising human endeavour. And the doors of high hope for 
our own land and for the world swing open as we interpret 
all our smaller loyalties in the terms of our larger insights. 
In Paul, Christianity fought its first battle with crippling 
provineialism. That struggle will continue until the cos- 
mopolitan spirit of the founder of the Christian faith 
becomes universal. As we make the world our city, we 
will find the path of orderly life and creative activity 
for all mankind. 


XVIII 
THE FRIENDLINESS OF THE UNIVERSE 


“They that are with us are more——” II Kings 6: 16. 


The bit of border warfare experience, narrated in the 
sixth chapter of the Second Book of Kings, has a graphic 
interest, a touch of almost gay humour, and a certain 
wealth of suggestiveness. The King of Syria sends an 
expedition to surround the little city which shelters the 
seer who seems able to read his thoughts and to forestall 
his designs. The servant of the seer is in a perfect panic 
of fear as he sees the chariots and the horses about the 
city. Huis master calms his fears, completely deceives the 
Syrian soldiers, leads them to the heart of Samaria, per- 
suades the King to set ample food before them, and sends 
them home in such a mood and with such a story to tell 
that thereafter the petty marauding border expeditions 
cease. 

There is something arresting about the panic of the 
servant of Elisha. For fear is a great human foe. 
Nations have their characteristic fears. Most men hide 
a fear cowering somewhere in their hearts. And fear itself 
causes some of the greatest tragedies in the life of man. 
If European nations could cease fearing each other, what 
a new Europe would be born. If the hidden, brooding 
fear could be torn from every human heart, what a new 
world would come to be. The fear of the servant of 
Elisha was robbed of its horror by a vision of unsuspected 
resources. ‘The mountain was full of horses and chariots 
to the eye of faith. And in the light of that vasion, fear 
fled away. 

138 


THE FRIENDLINESS OF THE UNIVERSE 139 


Perhaps the deepest fear which comes to men is the 
fear that the very system of things is against goodness 
and unselfishness and love. The fair dreams of ideal 
beauty fling their haunting colour before their eyes but 
they are crushed by the impact of hard and brutal facts. 
The deep and paralysing doubt of the fundamental power 
of goodness in the world is like a subtle poison in the 
blood. It weakens men’s arms in the fight. It takes 
away that joyous confidence which is half of the victory. 
The suspicion that the world is the foe and not the friend 
of goodness is the basis of the most profound kind of fear 
which can come to the heart which cares for ethical things. 

Such a fear must be confronted honestly. And we must 
ask ourselves if there are unsuspected resources in the 
universe which are on the side of goodness and cleanness 
and strength and justice and love. There are visible foes 
in plenty. If our eyes were opened, would we see the 
cohorts of our allies all about us as we propose to fight 
the good fight? Would we find that the process of evolu- 
tion, the very élan vital of the universe, is with us and not 
against us ? 

1.—When we put the question in this form and begin 
to survey the materials with which we must deal in form- 
ing an answer, we find light all about the Easter sky. 
And ere long we find ourselves clear in the position that 
the fundamental process of the world is the ally of advanc- 
ing life. That mighty tale of adventure which biology 
brings to our attention is the story of a great living 
impulse pushing ever forward and onward. ‘There was 
a time when all life was in the water. The land contained 
no vegetation. It contained no animal life. And that 
deep spirit of adventure and forth giving, which is central 
in the most potential life, moved from the sea to conquer 
the land. That forth giving, that onward movement, that 
forward reach, represent the purpose which is expressing 
itself in the whole biological process. Life is not with 
a static content. Life is not with a hanging back. Life 


140 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


is with a going forward. Out of the seas upon the lands, 
life moves. The universe is on the side of advance. 

2.—Then we may say quite definitely that, at every 
stage, the forces of life which refuse to adjust themselves 
to the advancing demand go down. The rocks have a 
profoundly fascinating story to tell. They are the ceme- 
tery of vanished forces of life. And their story is all 
the while making it clear that some potent vital impulse 
of adaptation to environment has been at work in living 
things through all the multitudinous passing years. 
Beyond the eye of man, as he looks back, beyond the 
conscious understanding of all the living things which 
experienced it, there was this strange readiness to find 
a way to fit into the new situation and to take the new 
step. And wherever this was not found, the particular 
form of life simply ceased to exist. The sure and unhesi- 
tating purpose, moving through all this seething of vast 
and manifold vitalities, did not need to use haste, for all 
its ways had a deep certainty. The more one contemplates 
the biological process, the more he sees this forward thrust, 
this inevitable destruction, if the particular force falls out 
of the process of adaptation which is central to the con- 
quest of life over the conditions in which it finds itself. 

You can view all the facts in a hard cold fashion. You 
can view them with quickened imagination, and responsive 
heart and awakened spirit. And if your eyes glow with 
the flashing perception of the deepest insight, you will 
want to use another word instead of “process” as you 
talk of it all. You will want to use the word God. There 
is a mystical experience of the deepest meaning of the 
biological process. The Hebrew poets passed all the 
knowledge of their time through the fires of their devotion 
and it came forth the gleaming gold of religious poetry. 
When we have dared to pass the whole story which science 
has told us through the fires of our devotion, it will come 
forth shining gold, gleaming with the superscription and, 
in a sense, the image of Almighty God. 

3.—The coming of mind brings a new force into the 


THE FRIENDLINESS OF THE UNIVERSE 141 


world. And the really potent elements in that force are 
on the side of growth and progress and goodness. To be 
sure, the possession of mind involves the possibility of 
refusing to be a part of the ongoing process. Rationality 
may be used for irrational ends. The mind may be used 
to make the worse appear the better reason. But the 
misuse of mind is the defeat of mind. The prostituting 
of the power of thought involves the decay of personal 
power. It may take years to work the destructive process 
through to its consummation. More than one generation 
may be required to reveal the tragic results of the misuse 
of the mind. But the process is unhesitating and conclu- 
sive. A straight, clear, honest use of the mind makes for 
conquering power in all the struggle of life. And an 
adroit, sophisticated, dishonest use of the mind makes 
for the weakening of the individual; the depletion of the 
society where it is practiced; and the ultimate overthrow 
of the civilisation of which it is a part. In fact, you have 
to have a general faith in the mind to make the thought 
productive; and at a certain point scepticism as to the 
mental honesty of others would break up that way of 
living together upon which all society is based. The short 
cuts of the dishonest mind are, in the last analysis, fatal 
to that mind itself. 

The coming of the mind does make tragic evil possible. 
But the very system of things is fighting the unscrupulous 
mind all the while. The love of truth is more than fine 
sentiment. It is structural in the developing life of 
humanity. Banish the belief in a remorseless candour 
of truth-telling, and science itself becomes impossible. 
The mind was not meant to be an instrument of deception. 
It was meant to be an instrument of contact with reality. 
The man who is incapable of telling himself the truth is 
sure to go down in the pressing conflicts of this world of 
struggle. Truth is not a handicap. It is a suit of armour. 
And without that suit of armour the advances of the armies 
of life would be impossible. The practice of the use of 


142 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


the mind reveals a code of honesty to be involved in its 
successful functioning. 

The great liars of the world have not been the mighty 
figures they have sometimes fancied. The lie which coiled 
at the heart of all their falsehood proved at last their 
undoing. Society holds together through the honest use 
of the mind. In just the degree that the mind is misused, 
society begins to fall apart. 

4,—The growth of moral discernment brings a new ally 
to the advancing forces of life. And this moral life has 
a regal power in the movement of history. If a nation 
stands against it, that nation stagnates and goes down. 
We have already had a glimpse of the fact that the mind 
has a conscience, active at its heart. This conscience 
emerges and becomes more and more regal in its assertions 
and in its demonstrations of power. ‘The story of the 
forward movement of the moral consciousness of the race 
is a strange and checkered tale. But it is full of inspira- 
tion for all that. And you must judge it by its consum- 
mation and not by its lowly beginnings. The impulse to 
moral distinction and the impulse for moral obedience 
are not to be regarded as something foreign to the whole 
forward thrust of vital energy in biological history. It 
is the consummation and the flower of what has gone 
before. And often there is more than a hint of its meaning 
in earlier stages of experience. 

There was a time when men thought of the evolutionary 
process as merely the brutal struggle for the survival of 
the physically fit. Hard and ruthless self-assertion was 
believed to be at the heart of it. And then men were put 
to it to find a place for the gentler and more self-effacing 
moralities in the process which is central to the ongoing 
of life. Then men, like Prince Kropatkin, called our 
attention to the place of “mutual aid” in the process. 
They discovered that motherhood is not a modern and 
not a merely human invention. And motherhood is self- 
sacrifice alive. The biological process is all shot through 
with the self-giving of motherhood. So the two principles 


THE FRIENDLINESS OF THE UNIVERSE 148 


of self-assertion and self-sacrifice play in and out of each 
other all through the unfolding evolution of living forms. 
And the highest ethic of self-sacrifice is but the full unfold- 
ing of something which is at the very centre of the process 
of evolution itself. The universe is not a foe to self- 
sacrifice. It is by a process which has included the pro- 
foundest self-giving that life has come to be what it is. 
Ethics, both in the form of nobly assertive strength and 
nobly gracious self-surrender, is not something foreign, 
injected into the movement of life. It is an indigenous 
part of that movement. Here, once again, as we see the 
sweep and the range of it all, we are inclined to do some 
serious thinking. We come to see a force making for a 
moral consummation moving everywhere. And we are 
ready once more to substitute another word for that 
descriptive noun, “process.”” We are inclined again to 
substitute the word, “God.” 

5.—The growth of spiritual aspiration. The life of the 
spirit is a rare and gracious flowering of human person- 
ality. It is probably very much older in the race and it 
is surely more a structural element in life than in our 
moments of unkindled and objective analysis we some- 
times think. The desire to make an ally of the forces 
which control the universe is, it would seem clear, at least 
as old as thought itself. Indeed, all biological experience 
at an earlier stage is ready to come to two conceptions 
when once consciousness appears, the conceptions of ele- 
ments working for and elements working against the 
struggling life. This desire to find an ally may grow or 
has grown and unfolded into all the glory of ethical re- 
ligion. It may descend into all the baseness of the most 
evil magic and the most bestial of the observance which 
call themselves religion. Here again it is more and more 
clear, as we observe closely, that life is upon the side of 
the higher and nobler forms of expression. The ongoing 
process is against the baser forms. The advancing nations 
parallel their growth in other ways with a growth in the 
nobler forms of religion. The nations which turn back 


144 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


to beastly religions go down. The nations which enshrine 
noble forms of ethical and spiritual religion come to 
larger leadership and power. Even in Christianity itself, 
it may be observed that the noblest forms of worship are 
somehow found in the nations of surest and most prom- 
ising vitality. Life then is on the side of advancing 
religion. It is no more decadent in religion than in 
physical qualities. The universe is on the side of the 
loftiest sort of spiritual faith. 

A man like John Knox sets going great currents of 
almost austerely ethical and spiritual religion in a land 
which has many physical limitations. And four centuries 
later that virile piety has produced a type which is sup- 
plying officials for the whole British Empire and some- 
times more than dominates the cabinet which guides the 
destiny of the Empire itself. John Wesley preaches vital 
piety over England and sends his preachers to America. 
And new qualities of strength and functioning power come 
to the whole English-speaking world. 

There is nothing so practical as spiritual religion. If 
men spurn it, what might have been a friend turns to an 
efficient foe. The nation which sets its face against it is 
already in process of decay. 

And the individual finds the same unhesitating power 
at work. Gamaliel Bradford has recently published a 
fascinating series of biographical studies, entitled “Dam- 
aged Souls.” As one reads the tales of brilliant indirec- 
tion represented by the life of Aaron Burr and the black 
deception seen in that of Benedict Arnold, one cannot 
fail to realise that if the sanctions of a spiritual religion, 
shot through with ethical fire, had been in command of 
their lives, the shipwreck of character would have been 
averted. As with these men, so with all men. As with 
the nations we have mentioned, so with all nations. The 
forces of spiritual religion have the secret of survival in 
them. ‘They are a part, a high and noble part, of that 
forward thrust of life which moves, through all those 


THE FRIENDLINESS OF THE UNIVERSE 145 


forces of which biology tells us, and at last comes to moral 
and spiritual expression in the life of man. 

6.—When we have all these things in mind as we view 
the personality and the life of Jesus Christ, we at last 
realise that all the separate rays of light come to an aston- 
ishing focus in Him. That long tale which began with 
the emerging of life on this planet comes to fulfillment 
and triumphant glory in Him. He is the intellectual, 
and moral, and spiritual consummation of the evolution- 
ary process. This does not mean that the process itself 
exhausts the meaning of His life. There are infinite 
reaches of His life Godward which transcend all the 
appraisals of human analysis. But it does mean that the 
world is His world; that it has a profound kinship with 
Him; that there is a sure line of continuity between the 
very beginnings of life on the planet and the splendour 
of His harmonious personality. Everything there was 
on the way to Him. He is the mind of the process, for 
He reveals fully the mind of the God who speaks in it all. 
He is the conscience of the process, for He expresses its 
ethical implications. He is the heart of the process. For 
the heart of God who moves through it all is His heart and 
the life of God is His life. ’ 

And all the years since the coming of Jesus represent 
the adventure of that forward movement, which more and 
more suffuses life with His principles and puts society 
at the command of His personality. The process which 
had kinship with Him and found its consummation in 
Him, has kinship with a society, made Christian through 
and through. The social appropriation of all that Jesus 
was, and is, represents the next stage in the process of 
evolution itself. 

And all of this means that while there are foes enough, 
and while life sees tragedy and shipwreck enough, the 
world, even the universe, are to be found on the side of 
men and women who are battling for a Christian consum- 
mation. In hours when discouragement almost turns into 
panic, we, too, may look from our foes to our resources. 


146 THE IMPERIAL VOICE 


We, too, may say “‘They that are with us are more than 
they who are with them.” The universe is our friend 
when we seek the ways of goodness. For the universe is 
the expression in time of the character of that God whose 
face we see in the face of Christ. 


THE END 








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